There are many wonderful family history Web pages on the Internet which remain undiscovered because people just don't know how to locate them. These pages may contain just the valuable information that you are looking for - family trees, photographs, wills, stories, cemetery transcriptions, etc.



Many of us start our search for ancestors on the Internet by going to our favorite search engine's home page and typing in our surname. Imagine our surprise when thousands upon thousands of pages show up in the listings! One or more of these listings may very well contain information on the ancestor we are looking for, but who has time to wade through thousands of pages? Surfing online for surnames can be fun, but very time consuming, and often unrewarding. Typing a surname into a search engine will bring up almost any page on the Internet that contains that name.

This can include company names, Webmaster names, names from online membership rosters, etc. These pages are usually not the ones we are looking for.

The search doesn't get any easier when you are looking for genealogy how-to information. Spelling genealogy correctly seems to be one of the hardest things for beginners to learn. Therefore, if you are searching for pages with genealogy information, you also have to search for geneology, geneaology, genlogy, geniology, geneologie etc. When this writer first started searching for her own family before I did my husband’s it was almost enough to make me pull my hair out and other‘s that got near me!

So just how do we go about finding the pages with the information for which we are looking? It is all in how you work with the search engines. Different search engines require different search techniques, but there are a few tricks that you can learn which will work for the majority of them. There are also a number of ways to restrict your search to pages which are primarily genealogically oriented, which can drastically cut down on the number of "garbage" sites in your search results. These techniques will help you to focus your search, and spend much less time wading through non-relevant pages.

good way to begin looking for family history Web pages is to start with genealogically specific directories and search engines. While these will by no means encompass every family history site on the Internet, they do provide an easy way to weed out sites which do not contain genealogy related information.

Genealogy Directory at About

If you are looking for information on a specific genealogy topic such as vital records, census research, immigration, or online lessons, then this genealogy directory is an excellent place to start. The genealogy sites listed in this directory have been selected as being outstanding in their topic. They are organized into over 60 categories and each Web site includes a brief description/review so that you know what to expect before following the link. If you are unsure which category to look in, then you can search the entire directory for specific keywords.

#One advantage to using this type of genealogy directory is that the Web sites which are included have been organized and compiled by a human, not a computer. A real person has reviewed these sites and found them useful. What some consider to be a disadvantage of directories, however, is that they do not include all Web sites on a specific topic. So if you are looking for every last Web page on the Internet which relates to your surname, a genealogy directory will not provide you with what you want. A second disadvantage of directories is that the definition of "useful" used by the compiler of the directory may differ from yours. They are, however, an excellent place to go when you don't have a specific surname or site in mind and want to discover and explore the many great Web sites available for genealogists. Choose a subject of interest, click on a link, and you are off!

In addition to the Genealogy Directory at About, some other excellent genealogy directories which you may want to try include:

Distant Cousins: It’s a site that provides a quick reference point for any surname.

GeneaLinks: It’s a Marriage Record Database. It also gives links to Genealogy Sites through a Link directory.

Cyndie’s List. It’s a list of Genealogy sites on the internet.

There are times, however, when a directory just isn't going to contain the information that you are searching for. This is especially true in the case of surname specific Web pages. While genealogy directories will often list family Web pages, they don't even come close to listing them all. This is where search engines step up to bat.

In addition to genealogy directories, there are also genealogy specific search engines. These work in the same way as the regular search engines, except that they allow you to search just on genealogical sites. This eliminates the non-genealogy sites that would normally come up in your search results because something on one of the pages matches your search criteria. Genealogy-specific search engines allow you to look for only those sites which pertain to genealogy and family history.

Keep in mind that when you use genealogy-specific search engines, you will not need to use words like genealogy in your search terms. These sites, by their very nature, are about genealogy, and using such words as search terms will not help to focus your results.

Several good genealogy-specific search engines include:

Genealogy Search: This provides a uniform search interface to various genealogy sites online.

Internet Family Finder: This site helps in finding information in the Family Tree Maker page by entering a keyword and clicking search now. Only looking for Names? Use the Family Finder.

Surname Finder: This site provides easy access to free and commercial resources for some 1, 731,000 plus surnames. One each surname specific “Finder Page", you can search a variety of online databases all pre-programmed with your surname.

I Found It: They have a genealogy web directory exclusively for genealogist. The genealogy web search is a free resource to the internet genealogy community.

Genealogy Portal: You’ll find yourself at the TreEZy home page. TreEZy is a search engine focused on sites useful in research of genealogy, family history, and local history. To begin a search one must type in their criteria in th form presented on the site and click on the search button.

These search engines are all excellent reference tools for finding family history Web pages, but they are only as good as the pages that are submitted to them. For each Web site which they contain, there are many, many more genealogy related pages that they do not have indexed. So how do you find those pages? This is where learning to use the standard search engines effectively comes in

Search engines are very powerful tools for searching the Internet for information using keywords and phrases. Electronic scouts, known as "robots" or "spiders" explore Web sites and "index" each word within their pages. This information is then compiled into a searchable database. When you enter a query into a search engine, it matches your query words against the records it has in its database to present a listing of possible documents meeting your request.

The key advantage to using a search engine to find your surnames is the size of their index, which typically includes information on millions and millions of Web pages. This size does have its drawbacks, however. Due to the sheer number of results possible with a search engine, there is often no way (outside of visiting each one yourself) to determine the quality of the links or their relevancy to your search topic. This can often leave you more frustrated than when you began.

Search Engine Math

One of the best ways to focus your search is to use what many call Search Engine Math. Two simple operators, add (+), subtract (-), can go a long way toward narrowing your search results. These operators are supported by the majority of the major search engines and directories and are a lot easier to learn and remember for most users than the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.

Beginning each keyword with a plus (+) symbol helps you to tell the search engine to find pages that include all of the words that you enter, not just some of them. For example, consider a search where you are looking for the surname HOGG. Typing that name into AltaVista brings up 3,002,420 pages which match your search request! But assume that what you are really looking for is information on a man named Ima Hogg. You would want to look for pages which contain both names. Typing in your search request this way:

+Hogg +Ima. This would bring the number of results down to a much more manageable 635 pages. Now the majority of these pages probably have nothing to do with genealogy, but we will get to that in a moment.

The minus (-) symbol allows you to search for pages that have one word on them but not another word. This is especially useful in the case of surnames which have a dual meaning. For example, imagine you want information about the surname RICE, but don't want to be overwhelmed by pages relating to cooking and food. You could search this way: rice -food -cook . When you enter the term rice into AltaVista, 983,420 pages are found which match your request. If you exclude the words food and cook, as in the above example, the number of returned pages drops to 787,800. That is still a lot of pages, but it's almost 200,000 less than it was when you started!

This minus (-) technique also comes in handy when you want to exclude information about celebrities (sports heroes, movie stars, etc) who share your surname from your results.

Phrase Searching

It is all well and good to use the plus (+) symbol to include both the given name and the surname of an ancestor in your search, but it does you little good when searching the vast majority of family sites that have their pedigree information in databases. There are so many names in such databases, that it is likely that your names will both be found, just not in relation to one another. Consider your search for an ancestor by the name of Ima Hogg: +Hogg+Ima

This would turn up any page which contained both of those names - not taking into consideration the fact that the page has a Ima BACON and a Bob BACON, but no trace of a IMA HOGG. This is where phrase searching comes in handy. Phrase searching is a technique used to ask search engines to find documents that contain words in the exact order that you specify. You do this by enclosing your terms with quotation marks. Using the previous example, this would look like: “Ima Hogg".

The search engine basically treats this as one search term and will only return pages that contain the term Ima Hogg, as a phrase where the two words are next to each other. This search technique too has its problems. In the Ima HOGG example, the search would not have returned any pages which list last name first in their database, i.e. Hogg, Ima.

Pretty much all of the major search engines support phrase searching. AltaVista and Google actually attempt to perform automatic phrase searching as their default setting (meaning that you don't have to enclose your search terms in quotation marks when using those search engines).

Wild Card Searching

Wild card searches are an extremely useful tool for genealogists. A wild card search allows you to enter a character (usually an *) to search for plurals of a word or variations in spelling. Since names can be spelled in so many different ways, it is a tremendous help to be able to automate your search with the use of a wild card character. For example the name McKliget is spelled McKliget, McKelliget, & McKliggett. This saves you from the tedious job of searching individually on all possible spellings of the name.

For example, I know that when I research the name, JONESas the surname, I must also search on the singular Jone. The wild card search: Jone* would return all matches to JONE and JONES.

When it has come to this writers experience in this are I have found that the major search engines which currently support wild card searches are AOL Search (?), AltaVista (*), Inktomi - iWon (* or ?), Northern Light (* or %) and Yahoo (*). Excite, Google, Go, Overture, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN Search and WebCrawler do not currently support the wild card character. You should check the help page for your favorite search engine to see if and how they handle wild card searches.

Now that you have learned how to use the search engines effectively, it is time to learn how to fine-tune those searches to turn up pages on your specific family and not everyone who happens to share a surname. Several techniques can be used to turn those 3,002,420 SMITH pages in AltaVista into a reasonable amount of Web sites with a decent chance of containing the information that you are looking for.

Include Given Names

Searching for given names in conjunction with surnames can really help to focus your search. +William +Anderson

In cases such as this, where the name is such a common one, this technique may not help you to narrow the search results enough. Try searching for a family member with a more unusual name (such as Joletta). Try as many different combinations as you can think of, because not everyone will know everything that you do about the family. Remember to try phrase searching as well.

Include Place Names

Why look at ANDERSON family Web pages from Zimbabwe when your ANDERSON ancestors were from Minnesota? Most family historians tend to mention locations in their online information, so use this to your advantage. Use the math search technique and try searching for: +Anderson +Minnesota

That takes the 3,000,000+Anderson sites on AltaVista down to about 36,000. Not bad for a simple little search term!

Search for Less Common Surnames

One of the most often overlooked ways of narrowing your search is to search first on the more uncommon surnames in your family tree. If your ANDERSON married into the SABERTOOTH family, then start by searching for SABERTOOTH. They will be a lot easier to find and will, hopefully, lead you right back to your ANDERSON family. The downside to this type of search, however, is that you are limiting information sources to people who knew that the ANDERSON and SABERTOOTH families were connected in the first place.

This writers favorite Genealogy site is Ancestry.com. Millions and millions of people use Ancestry.com each month to search for their ancestors. And many of these millions of people type in a name and, possibly a location, and after clicking through dozens of search results, walk away in frustration! Does that sound like you? While Ancestry.com may very well not have your ancestors listed in its databases, it does provide some fairly powerful search options which are often overlooked. Learn how to become an Ancestry.com power searcher with these easy search tips and techniques.

Begin with Advanced Search

Advanced search at Ancestry.com provides users with many options for more effective searching, and should always be your starting point for any search. The Advanced Search form can be accessed directly through the home page at Ancestry.com by clicking on "Advanced Search" next to the "Search" button.

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Narrow by Locality

To narrow your search results it is often most useful to begin with a surname and a locality. This will not filter out all search results which do not correlate to the specific locality, however. For example, a database which covers multiple locations in addition to the one you entered may still present all results for that surname from each location represented in the database. Example: A search for CRISP in NORTH CAROLINA will provide plenty of NC-specific results for birth, marriage, and death records (because these databases are specific to NC), while most of the search results under military records aren't NC-specific (i.e. include CRISPs from Massachusetts) because the databases themselves aren't NC-specific. This search, while obviously not perfect, still helps to weed out a lot of extraneous data.

An Alternative Locality Search

An alternative to locality search is to use the keyword search option to narrow results to a specific-locality. Entering NORTH CAROLINA as a keyword in my CRISP search means that the military records which appear are only ones that mention "North Carolina" in proximity with the surname CRISP. The drawbacks to this search technique are that you will have to search on all variations of the locality (i.e. NC, N.C., etc.) and that you then run the risk of eliminating a possible hit in cases where the locality name has been misspelled or not even included in a specific database. You'll find this search to be most helpful in cases where you have a very common surname and/or a very populous locality.

Refine Your Search

When searching a database, I usually begin by using only the surname and locality. After I look at the search results, I then check the promising databases individually. If the search results are still very wide, I next scroll down to the bottom of the page and use the "Refine Your Search" box which will include specific fields you can use to further narrow your search in that specific database. Some will allow you to refine by date or county, while others may only allow you to use a keyword to narrow your search. Use these fields to zero in by county name, date, parent's names, or any other fields that you see included and for which you have information.

Soundex Search

Many of the databases at Ancestry.com allow for Soundex searches, so be sure to take advantage of this feature in the Advanced Search template. This feature helps you find names which "sound like" your surname, and will hopefully help you to turn up results for some of the misspelled, mistyped names which are sure to exist in the databases.

Sometimes Manual is Better

While soundex search can be extrememly helpful, for the best results it should always be used in combination with a manual search for common surname misspellings. For example, a soundex search for OWENS (soundex code 520) will not turn up results for the singular OWEN (soundex code 500) because they don't share the same soundex code.

Wild About Wildcard

Since my ancestors appear under a variety of different name spellings, wildcard search is one of my best friends at Ancestry.com. My Henderson BURCH appears as Hendursen, Hendurson, Hendursan, Hendorsun, Hendorson, Hendorsen and then Henderson..you get the idea. Then there is BIRCH, BIRRCH, BERCH, BERRCH, BURRCH, BURCH, etc. The one biggest drawback to Ancestry.com wildcard search is that you have to include at least three characters before the wildcard character - so a search for BUR* will pick up BURRCH, BURCH, but still miss BIRCH. A search for Hen* will pick up most first name variations for my Henderson, however. Wildcard search is especially useful when searching for first name variations in combination with a common last name.

Wildcard search options at Ancestry.com:

An asterisk * represents 0-6 characters (i.e.

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a search for "john*" would return "john, johnson, johnsen, johnathon, johns," etc.).

Any use of the asterisk requires at least the first three letters of a name (you cannot search for "Bu*" but can use "Bur*").

A single character is represented by question mark "?" (i.e. a search for "Bu'ch" will return both "Burrch" and "Burch").

Last, but certainly not least, be sure to keep a Research Log while you are searching Ancestry.com. Mark down who you searched for, where you searched for them, which variations you tried, and what your results were. This will help keep you from spinning your wheels and duplicating your research time as you move ahead with your research.

And, most of all, remember to have fun and be patient!

For further comments you may reach me at 1-888-323-8916 Option 101or email me at abundantriches4u@gmail.com