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Friday, January 11, 2013

Where would I search next?

I had an interesting time yesterday following my own advice. To explain a little, I often teach about Google.com and encourage those in my classes to "look for each name in your pedigree" (quoting myself). So I was sitting in the Mesa FamilySearch Library helping a patron and getting pretty much no where. So I started picking names off of the hand-written pedigree chart she was compiling and looking each one up in a Google search. Within a few minutes, I found a lengthy history of her family over five generations in a small county in Arkansas. She was amazed and I was just as amazed. Actually, she was practically in tears.

So where would I search next? Or first or where ever? How about Google searches on the names in your database? Try searching for the surname + the location, the complete name in quotations (to force a string search for just that set of characters), and then search for combinations of names; husbands and wives, parents and children etc. Who knows what you might find and its free (or as free as anything on the Internet is free).

1 comment:

  1. A great resource is the digitized newspaper archive at the Library of Congress. (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) Newspapers had all sorts of fun little tidbits of information that don't show up in official sources. Lately, I've been happy to find the jobs young single women have had in the early 20th Century. You don't find this in any official record, but you do find it in little snippets of "Social News" in local newspapers.

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