Genealogy Online

by Elizabeth Crowe

  Certainly, as a genealogist, you’ve experienced the thrill of discovering things for yourself—it can be quite a kick to find a website or blog none of your friends know about. To do this, you need a way to find genealogical resources on the Internet on your own. That’s where search sites come in.

  Defining Terms

  A search engine is an all-purpose label used to describe anything that will let you search for terms within a group of data. That data could be on a single site or on billions of pages on the Internet, or on some subset in between the two. Just about anything that lets you search can be called a search engine, but some other terms are more accurate for specific sites.

  A spider is a program that looks for information on the Internet, creates a database of what it finds, and lets you use a search engine on that database to find specific information. As noted, this can mean billions of pages or only the pages on one site.

  Note

  If you are interested in search engines, how they work, and how they compare to one another, check out Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com).

  A search site might claim to search “the whole Web,” but, in reality, most probably cover only about 15 percent of the Web at any given time. This is because pages quickly appear and disappear on the Web. That’s why you might want to use several different search sites when you are searching for specific information or for general types of sites. Or, you might want to try one of the many meta-search engines that try several search sites at once. You can also use Google Earth to plot your ancestors’ land holdings or see where a town used to be.

  A search site called a directory or a catalog uses a search engine to let you hunt through an edited list of Internet sites for specific information. The value of these sites is that in a directory or catalog, websites are sorted, categorized, and sometimes rated. Most often, the directory is included in a portal, which pulls together searches of news, information, text, pictures, and whatever into one page, which you can modify to your liking.

  Then there are portals. Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) was one of the first catalogs or directories established online; it is also a good example of a portal that offers other services, such as chat, news, forums, RSS readers, and more. A portal is a little bit of everything: a search engine for the Web at large, a catalog of sites the owners recommend, and usually a group of other features, including stock prices, web-based e-mail, shopping, and so on. Excite, AOL, Google, MSN, and news sites such as CNN and MSNBC all have portals you can customize to some extent.

  A meta-search engine submits your query to several different search sites, portals, and catalogs at the same time. You might get more results, and you will usually be able to compare how each one responded to the query. These searches may take longer, however, and getting millions of results is almost more trouble than getting one. There are genealogy-specific meta-search engines, and you will find information on some of them later in this chapter. Examples of general meta-search sites are Lycos, Dogpile, and Metacrawler. You can also check out the page www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Multi-Search (see Figure 5-1) for a list of many different meta-search engines.

  FIGURE 5-1. DMOZ, The Open Directory Project, has an edited list of meta-search engines.

  Searching with Savoir Faire

  Searching can be as easy as typing “Powell Genealogy” and clicking the search button. Two problems: (1) you may get so many hits that you feel you are drinking from a fire hose; and (2) the top ones will be very common, popular sites you have already heard of.

  It doesn’t have to be that way. You can make the spiders boogie if you just sing the right tune. Thankfully, search algorithms (the language of the spiders) have come a long way since the days when search engines could not tell the difference between a blind Venetian and a Venetian blind!

  Here are some general search tips:

  • Choose your search terms carefully, and use phrases or several words that are relevant to your search. Typing “Spencer genealogy Ohio” will narrow a search quite well.

  • Use quotes to search for a specific order of words. Searching on the phrase “Spencer family history” (without quotation marks) will match all pages that have any of those three words included somewhere on the page, in any order, and not necessarily adjacent to each other. Searching the phrase “Spencer family history” (with quotation marks) will return only those pages that have those three words together.

  • The more specific you are, the better. Searching for Irish genealogy databases will give you fewer, but closer, matches than searching for Irish genealogy.

  • Use plus and minus signs in your searches. A word preceded by a plus sign (+) must appear on the page to be considered a match. A word preceded by a minus sign (–) must not appear on the page to be considered a match. No spaces can be between the plus and minus signs and the words they apply to. For example:

  +Spencer -royal genealogy

  Entering the above code would ask the search engine to find pages that contain the word “Spencer” but not the word “royal,” with the word “genealogy” preferred, but optional. Most search engines would get some Spencer genealogy pages but leave out those that include Lady Diana, Princess of Wales. More about this type of search can be found in the following section about Boolean searches.

  Every now and then, search for “geneology” instead of “genealogy.” You will be amazed at how many pages out there use this misspelling in their titles and body text!

  Another tip: Look carefully at the results page of whatever search engine you use. You may find links to limit or sort the searches by date, length of the page, language, and other parameters.

  Note

  Narrow your search if you get too many matches. Sometimes, the search engine results page will have an input box to allow you to search for new terms specifically among the first results. This might mean adding terms or deleting terms and then running the search again just on the results from the first search.

  Using Boolean Terms

  Searching the Internet is no simple matter. With literally billions of sites, some of them with millions of documents, and more words than you can imagine, finding exactly the right needle in all that hay can be daunting. The key, of course, is crafting a precise query.

  Boolean operators are handy tools for honing your searches. Named after George Boole, the nineteenth-century mathematician who dreamed up symbolic logic, Boolean operators represent the relationships among items using terms such as OR, AND, and NOT. When applied to information retrieval, they can expand or narrow a search to uncover as many citations, or hits, as you want.

  The Boolean OR

  When you search for two or more terms joined with an OR operator, you receive hits that contain any one of your terms. Therefore, the query:

  Powell OR genealogy

  will retrieve documents containing “Powell” or “genealogy,” but not necessarily both. Note that nearly all search pages default to OR—that is, they assume you want any page with any one or more of your terms in it.

  You can see it makes good sense to use OR when you search for synonyms or closely related terms. For example, if you’re looking for variations on a name, search for:

  SPENCER SPENCE SPENSER

  The average search engine will assume the OR operator and find any page with any one or more of those terms. However, the average search engine will also sort the results such that the pages with the most relevance appear at the top, using all your search terms to score that relevance.

  The Boolean AND

  In the Boolean boogie, joining search terms with AND means that all terms must be found in a document, but not necessarily together. The query:

  George AND Washington

  will result in a list of documents that have both the names “George” and “Washington” somewhere within them. Use AND when you have dissimilar terms and need to narrow a search. Usually, to use AND in a search, you type a plus sign (+) or put the term AND between the words
and enclose everything within parentheses, like so:

  (Spencer AND genealogy)

  The Boolean NOT

  When you use NOT, search results must exclude certain terms. Many search engines don’t have this functionality. Often, when you can use it, the syntax is to put a minus sign (–) in front of the unwanted term. The query:

  Powell NOT Colin

  will return all citations containing the name “Powell,” but none including “Colin,” regardless of whether “Powell” is there. Use NOT when you want to exclude possible second meanings. “Banks” can be found on genealogy surname pages as well as on pages associated with finance or with rivers. Searching for:

  banks AND genealogy NOT river

  or

  banks +genealogy -river

  increases the chance of finding documents relating to the surname Banks (the people, not riversides). In some search engines, the minus sign often takes the place of NOT.

  Note

  Remember, a simple AND doesn’t guarantee that the words will be next to each other. Your search for George AND Washington could turn up documents about George Benson and Grover Washington! To be sure you get the exact name you want, use the quotation marks.

  The fun part is combining Boolean operators to create a precise search. Let’s say you want to find documents about the city of Dallas, Texas. If you simply search for “Dallas,” you could get copious hits about Dallas County in Alabama (county seat: Selma), which might not be the Dallas you want. To avoid that, you would use AND, NOT, and OR in this fashion:

  (Dallas AND Texas) NOT (Selma OR Alabama)

  (Powell AND genealogy) NOT (Colin AND “SECRETARY OF STATE”)

  Note that parentheses groups the search terms together.

  Beyond AND/OR/NOT

  Some search engines enable you to fine-tune a search further. The WITH operator, for example, searches for terms that are much nearer to each other. How “near” is defined depends on the engine.

  Some search engines would look at “George WITH Washington” and deliver documents only containing the words “George Washington” next to each other. Others might consider words in the same sentence or paragraph to be near enough. This makes a difference if there might be an intervening (middle) name involved in your search.

  You can also sometimes use a question mark or an asterisk to find many different variants of a word. Check the search engine’s help files to see if it uses wildcards or word stemming (for finding all variations of a word, such as ancestry, ancestral, ancestor, and ancestors).

  Using these techniques, you can search the Web much more efficiently, finding just the right document on George Washington Carver or a genealogy site on the right set of Powells. Learn the steps to the Boolean boogie, and you’ll soon be web dancing wherever you please!

  Some Google-Specific Tips

  Google has some Boolean “operators” that can help you limit the results as well:

  • filetype Finds a result in a certain file type, such as PDF format. This also works for other file types, such as .doc, .jpg, .ppt, and so on.

  • site: or -site: With this operator, you can find results only from the specified site, or with the - sign you can exclude results from a certain site.

  • ~ Use the tilde to search for synonyms of your terms.

  • . . Use two periods to find a range (for example, 1800..1802).

  • * The asterisk is a wildcard, and can be used for whole words or parts of words. For example, you can put in “a * is as good as a *”.

  • related This term followed by the website address will bring up similar pages. If you find a website you like, try using related:[insert URL] to locate comparable websites.

  Google also has specialized searches that can be powerful. Book Search will look only at online books uploaded to Google Books. Image Search can look for faces, colors, and sizes. Map Search can look for “cemetery 35801” or any other geographical term.

  Note

  Syntax does not matter with operators. filetype: and site: can be used together in any order, for example.

  Search Sites

  The Web has an embarrassment of riches, some of which are more useful to genealogists than others. The following is a representative list of genealogy-related catalogs, portals, and search engines.

  Ancestral Findings

  At www.ancestralfindings.com, you will find a free surname database, which is useful for the beginner, but the real value of this site is that volunteers will search indexes of public records, published genealogies, abstracts, and books for you. Some lookups involve a charge, but many are free, and every week one or more of the paid resources are featured as free lookups. Here is how to do it: Choose a category. Click one of the titles within that category to request a lookup (only one per day). Databases are labeled “FREE” Lookup or “PAID” Lookup. First, you will see an automated message letting you know the request is entered, and later you will get the results. As it is all-volunteer, it can take up to a week, but you will also be entered in the weekly Free Genealogy Resource Drawing.

  Linkpendium

  Linkpendium is a wonderful search site, brought to you by Karen Isaacson and Brian (Wolf) Leverich. This hugely useful site is a catalog of links to U.S. genealogy information, records, pages, and sources, organized by geography. You can search by a surname and get links within every state, or you can start your search in a specific state or specific county. Links to obituaries, cemetery lists, wills, biographies, and more will be the result.

  A quote from the site: “Linkpendium’s goal is to index every genealogy, geneology, :) family history, family tree, surname, vital records, biography, or otherwise genealogically-related site on the Internet.”

  The site’s creators are part of online genealogy history, being two founders of the venerable and still indispensable RootsWeb genealogical community/information/data/search site. RootsWeb started as a few pages that a bunch of genealogists who worked together created to help each other. For more than a decade, RootsWeb was the starting place for online genealogy.

  Access Genealogy

  At this site, www.accessgenealogy.com, you can read and search for many different types of records for genealogy research, including newspapers and periodicals; emigration and immigration forms; census reports; voting records; and archives from libraries, cemeteries, churches, and courts (see Figure 5-2). The site is also widely known for Native American data.

  FIGURE 5-2. Access Genealogy is a family history meta-search site with quite a bit of Native American data.

  Ancestor Hunt

  With this meta-search site (www.ancestorhunt.com), you can search for ancestors and locate surnames in some of the best and largest databases of genealogy records online. The site has unique searches, such as the Surname Search Portal and the Obituary Search Portal, both of which search several sites at once.

  Two of the exceptional pages are Genealogical Prison Records and Past Sheriffs of the United States. You will find these, along with many other search engines and free genealogy resources, in the Genealogy Search Engines And Contents menu, which is located on each page.

  One of the most popular sections is the Bible Records Transcriptions. These family bibles are completely indexed by surname, with over 200 pages of transcriptions and scanned images. This site is one to bookmark!

  Biography Guide

  Was any ancestor of yours a member of Congress? Search for biographies of members by last name, first name, position, and state at this site: http://bioguide.congress.gov/biosearch/biosearch.asp. If your ancestors are in the database, this fascinating site can add a new dimension to your family history.

  Cyndi’s List

  The site www.cyndislist.com catalogs about a quarter-million genealogy websites. You will find links to the genealogy sites and sites that simply would help a genealogist. This is the first place many new online genealogists visit. The links are categorized and organized, and there’s also a search box for finding the subjects you
want quickly. Cyndi Howells works on the list every day, updating, deleting, and adding sites. Each new or updated link will have a small “new” or “updated” graphic next to it for 30 days.

  The main index is updated each time activity occurs on Cyndi’s List. Check the date under each category heading to determine when the last update was made for that category. The date is also updated at the bottom of each category page.

  Free Genealogy Search Help for Google

  This free site (www.genealogy-search-help.com/) is designed to help you use Google for genealogy-specific searches. It will create a series of different searches using Google’s advanced features that will likely improve your results.

  The site has a small family tree as a form for you to fill in with an ancestor, and this site will set up the best searches for you, based on what you enter. If you don’t know an ancestor’s parents but know one of the ancestor’s children, use the child’s name for the First Name and Last Name fields (and spouse, birth, and death) and then enter the ancestor as the Father or Mother. This gives more information for building a search.