Shame on me!! I've been away from the blog for a few too many days! I've been teaching or lecturing or researching almost 24/7. But I PROMISE.... I'll get some interesting "stuff" up later today or tomorrow.
I'll be offering the second week of a 4 week series here in Wilbraham this afternoon. But I'll be back home about 6 or so. I'll get some additional "Let We Forget" news and some interesting genealogy web links for you.
If you live in the area, First Church in Ludlow has allowed me to offer another fund raiser. It's a 5 week course in family history research with one session per week beginning Sept 3rd. Since there's a cost involved, everyone gets a few hours of personal family research which I compile into a small booklet to take with you. The cost is $49 per person or $79 per couple. You know how these work..."It's for a GOOD CAUSE!"
Also, I have more tips and tricks...
See you later!
Showing posts with label tips and tricks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tips and tricks. Show all posts
09 August 2013
31 July 2013
To share or not so share...
Since her subject is "To share or not to share..." so I thought it would be a good idea to do just that! It's always good to share when you run across good advice. This blog is from Barbara Schmidt...
To share or not so share....
Coming up late today from Old Bones Genealogy, more of "Lest We Forget" from my grandfather's 1913 diary. He continues to write about his experiences working on the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which eventually became the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Also, I may have a few more tips and tricks for improving your genealogical search results.
Please "share" this and other Old Bones blog posts. Comments and suggestions are welcome!
To share or not so share....
Coming up late today from Old Bones Genealogy, more of "Lest We Forget" from my grandfather's 1913 diary. He continues to write about his experiences working on the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which eventually became the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Also, I may have a few more tips and tricks for improving your genealogical search results.
Please "share" this and other Old Bones blog posts. Comments and suggestions are welcome!
30 July 2013
Strategy to Make Searching a Little Easier
I thought about this today. I use this strategy almost automatically. It's very useful, especially on computers with a slow internet connection or the computer itself is simply running slow.
After you've done a search and have a list of results in front of you, the next step is to click on one of the links. Right?? WRONG!!!
Certainly you have to click on the link to see what you've found, but if you look at the result and it's less that what you need, you have to hit the back button and your search page has to reload. The time for the reload can be FRUSTRATING to say the least.
So....how about leaving the search results on one tab and opening the results in a new tab or even a new window. That preserves the search results so that if the link opens to a page you don't need, just delete it a your original results page is still there....no waiting.
Now I suppose you'll want me to tell you how to do this. Actually, there are 2 ways to open your new link in a new tab and 2 ways to open your new link in a new window. The first method is to RIGHT CLICK the link. A drop down menu will open and there are the 2 options: Open in a new TAB or Open in a new WINDOW. If the new TAB isn't what you want, delete it or keep it to compare with other results. Same with the new window. Either way, your search results ARE STILL THERE AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR IT TO POP UP AGAIN....because it never went anywhere!
That's the first way, and this all depends on how you use your keyboard. I always use SHIFT + Click to open the link in a new window or CTRL + Click to open in a new tab. There are reasons I use one or the other. If you're still reading....as I ramble along.... I'll use a new window when I want to just bounce from one window to the new window and back again. That's another trick: ALT + TAB will let you "scroll" through all your open windows. If there's only, then you'll be able to go easily from on to the other. If you have multiple windows open, it will flip you from the current window to the LAST WINDOW OPENED. If you watch your screen while holding ALT + TAB, you'll see all the open windows! Just keep the ALT key down and tap the TAB button to move through all the open screens. CTL + TAB will flip you through all the open tabs in order. Again, if you only have 2 tabs only, you'll just go from one back to the other over and over again depending on how many times you click TAB while holding the ALT key.
Either way, the goal was to preserve the results of your search so you don't have to re-load the search results page. If you get good at this, you'll save yourself incremental minutes over the course of days or weeks or months giving you more time to figure out what the names are on that ancient deed you found!!
Good grief, if you're still reading, congratulations!! I could go on all night....and I hope I got all of this right!!!
If you have any questions, comment on the blog (so others can see the question and the answer) or send an e-mail to dave@oldbones.co---
Visit Old Bones Genealogy and Family Research of New England at http://www.oldbones.co and remember to share the blog or tweet the blog or reblog the blog….Whatever it is that works toward spreading it around!! And if you do, thanks!
After you've done a search and have a list of results in front of you, the next step is to click on one of the links. Right?? WRONG!!!
Certainly you have to click on the link to see what you've found, but if you look at the result and it's less that what you need, you have to hit the back button and your search page has to reload. The time for the reload can be FRUSTRATING to say the least.
So....how about leaving the search results on one tab and opening the results in a new tab or even a new window. That preserves the search results so that if the link opens to a page you don't need, just delete it a your original results page is still there....no waiting.
Now I suppose you'll want me to tell you how to do this. Actually, there are 2 ways to open your new link in a new tab and 2 ways to open your new link in a new window. The first method is to RIGHT CLICK the link. A drop down menu will open and there are the 2 options: Open in a new TAB or Open in a new WINDOW. If the new TAB isn't what you want, delete it or keep it to compare with other results. Same with the new window. Either way, your search results ARE STILL THERE AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR IT TO POP UP AGAIN....because it never went anywhere!
That's the first way, and this all depends on how you use your keyboard. I always use SHIFT + Click to open the link in a new window or CTRL + Click to open in a new tab. There are reasons I use one or the other. If you're still reading....as I ramble along.... I'll use a new window when I want to just bounce from one window to the new window and back again. That's another trick: ALT + TAB will let you "scroll" through all your open windows. If there's only, then you'll be able to go easily from on to the other. If you have multiple windows open, it will flip you from the current window to the LAST WINDOW OPENED. If you watch your screen while holding ALT + TAB, you'll see all the open windows! Just keep the ALT key down and tap the TAB button to move through all the open screens. CTL + TAB will flip you through all the open tabs in order. Again, if you only have 2 tabs only, you'll just go from one back to the other over and over again depending on how many times you click TAB while holding the ALT key.
Either way, the goal was to preserve the results of your search so you don't have to re-load the search results page. If you get good at this, you'll save yourself incremental minutes over the course of days or weeks or months giving you more time to figure out what the names are on that ancient deed you found!!
Good grief, if you're still reading, congratulations!! I could go on all night....and I hope I got all of this right!!!
If you have any questions, comment on the blog (so others can see the question and the answer) or send an e-mail to dave@oldbones.co---
Visit Old Bones Genealogy and Family Research of New England at http://www.oldbones.co and remember to share the blog or tweet the blog or reblog the blog….Whatever it is that works toward spreading it around!! And if you do, thanks!
29 July 2013
Short Google Tip
One of the advantages of using Google for genealogy research is its flexibility. Let's say you're looking for an ancestor who lived iin Albany, NY and then in Boston, MA. You also think they may have moved to Chicago at some point. In most search engines,this involves 3 separate searches: John Smith, Albany, New York; John Smith, Boston, Massachusetts; John Smith, Chicago, Illinois.
We talked in a previous post about the drop down menu that allows a single search in adjacent counties or states. That's obviously not going to work here as these 3 locations are far removed from one another.
So, what can you do? First, remember that you want to catch ALL the people named John Smith with any possible middle name or initial. We'll begin with "John * Smith".
Next in the string, we want to tell Google that we only want results that are pertinent to genealogy. Now our string looks like this:
"John * Smith" ~genealogy.
To narrow this search down to limit the results that mention Albany, Boston or Chicago, we don't have to do three individual searches and bounce back and forth between three different sets of results. That's where the operator "OR" comes in. Use "OR" in capital letters....that's important because that's what tells Google that you're looking for variable results. Your returns should include pages that includes those words: John [with anything in the middle but attached] Smith, related to genealogy and located in any of the three locations we indicated in the search string:
"John * Smith" ~genealogy +Boston OR Albany OR Chicago
Note that there is a "+" operator just before the three cities which touches the first word. But all the remaining words are separated by a single space.
Here's a list of results based on building this search:
John Smith (no quotation marks) 227,000,000 results
"John Smith" 22,600,000 (10% of original search)
"John * Smith" 7,160,000,000 (MUCH more because anything can occur between JOHN and SMITH...we haven't added ~genealogy yet)
"John * Smith" ~genealogy 203,000,000 results
"John * Smith" ~ genealogy +Boston OR Chicago OR Albany 135,000,000
Lots of different results! I suppose using a name like "John Smith" returns an enormous number of results simply because of the commonality of the name. If your ancestor is Abiah Makepeace (my 3rd cousin 8X removed), the results would, of course, be substantially smaller. I used the common name "John Smith" simply to better illustrate how dramatically the numbers can change. Note that when using "John * Smith", somewhere in the results you'll get a web page that contains the following line:
John Adams and his wife Abigail Smith
The first word is "JOHN" and the last word is "SMITH". We will get that returned in our results simply because Google did what we asked it to do. It found the word "JOHN" and the word "SMITH" and since the "*" was there, it didn't matter what was in the middle. To eliminate "Abigail," you could put -Abigail somewhere in your string.
Remember searching is not a SCIENCE, where 2 + 2 is always 4. It has to be...that's the science of mathematics. If "4" wasn't the answer, there'd be anarchy! Imagine what else could go wrong!!!
Searching can be better described as an ART. You modify, add, remove, edit and try, try, try until you get your results trimmed down to what you began looking for. And hopefully without eliminating results you want!
Good luck in your searching....more Google hints coming...
Visit Old Bones Genealogy and Family Research of New England at www.oldbones.co and remember to share the blog or tweet the blog or reblog the blog....Whatever it is that works toward spreading it around!! And if you do, thanks!
We talked in a previous post about the drop down menu that allows a single search in adjacent counties or states. That's obviously not going to work here as these 3 locations are far removed from one another.
So, what can you do? First, remember that you want to catch ALL the people named John Smith with any possible middle name or initial. We'll begin with "John * Smith".
Next in the string, we want to tell Google that we only want results that are pertinent to genealogy. Now our string looks like this:
"John * Smith" ~genealogy.
To narrow this search down to limit the results that mention Albany, Boston or Chicago, we don't have to do three individual searches and bounce back and forth between three different sets of results. That's where the operator "OR" comes in. Use "OR" in capital letters....that's important because that's what tells Google that you're looking for variable results. Your returns should include pages that includes those words: John [with anything in the middle but attached] Smith, related to genealogy and located in any of the three locations we indicated in the search string:
"John * Smith" ~genealogy +Boston OR Albany OR Chicago
Note that there is a "+" operator just before the three cities which touches the first word. But all the remaining words are separated by a single space.
Here's a list of results based on building this search:
John Smith (no quotation marks) 227,000,000 results
"John Smith" 22,600,000 (10% of original search)
"John * Smith" 7,160,000,000 (MUCH more because anything can occur between JOHN and SMITH...we haven't added ~genealogy yet)
"John * Smith" ~genealogy 203,000,000 results
"John * Smith" ~ genealogy +Boston OR Chicago OR Albany 135,000,000
Lots of different results! I suppose using a name like "John Smith" returns an enormous number of results simply because of the commonality of the name. If your ancestor is Abiah Makepeace (my 3rd cousin 8X removed), the results would, of course, be substantially smaller. I used the common name "John Smith" simply to better illustrate how dramatically the numbers can change. Note that when using "John * Smith", somewhere in the results you'll get a web page that contains the following line:
John Adams and his wife Abigail Smith
The first word is "JOHN" and the last word is "SMITH". We will get that returned in our results simply because Google did what we asked it to do. It found the word "JOHN" and the word "SMITH" and since the "*" was there, it didn't matter what was in the middle. To eliminate "Abigail," you could put -Abigail somewhere in your string.
Remember searching is not a SCIENCE, where 2 + 2 is always 4. It has to be...that's the science of mathematics. If "4" wasn't the answer, there'd be anarchy! Imagine what else could go wrong!!!
Searching can be better described as an ART. You modify, add, remove, edit and try, try, try until you get your results trimmed down to what you began looking for. And hopefully without eliminating results you want!
Good luck in your searching....more Google hints coming...
Visit Old Bones Genealogy and Family Research of New England at www.oldbones.co and remember to share the blog or tweet the blog or reblog the blog....Whatever it is that works toward spreading it around!! And if you do, thanks!
27 July 2013
Google Search: Using + , - , * and ? in genealogy searches
OK, let's continue the search for the mysterious John Smith. The previous hint initially found 228 million entries for the simple search for John Smith. That's a few more than anyone would be prepared to search through page by page. The we pared that down using "John Smith" and further by using "John Smith ~genealogy.
So here's the problem with "John Smith". If John is out there on the internet with either a middle initial or a full middle name, this simple search for "John Smith" with question marks isn't going to work to find them.
What do we do? The * and ? and other search tools are called "operators". The * ~ and ? are all operators as well as + and -.
If John MIGHT have a middle name, here's what you do: "John * Smith" ~genealogy. That search will return 208,000 responses, more that the 111,000 when we used only "John Smith". Why? Because the additional returns added all the entries that include something in between "John" and "Smith" in addition to "John Smith". Of course, I continued to add ~genealogy to keep the search focused on genealogy based search results.
I recommend using the * for a few reasons, even if you are 100000% sure that John's middle name was Morris. Why? Because in searching, you're subjected to how the indexing was done. Did the census taker hear "Morris" or "Norris". Or maybe the census worker got it right but the person who indexed the file read it wrong. Or it might even have been wrong in the first place. John Morris Smith more than likely isn't the person who told the census taker "John Morris Smith". Someone in the household or even a neighbor might have given the name as "John Alan Smith". It happens ALL THE TIME!!!
For those reasons and more, be aware that you're probably right... Let's say that John Morris Smith is, without even a shadow of a doubt, absolutely, positively your ancestor's correct name. You just can't be sure with how it was recorded then re-recorded then transcribed then indexed and then whatever!
Next, we'll start using the + and the - operators. Let's say you're ancestor was a pilot. You want to find the entries for the web sites about John Smith who was a pilot and not any others. Easy! Just add +pilot to your search. That way, the word pilot HAS to be in the web site somewhere. That doesn't mean you'll find John Smith the pilot, it just means that you're going to find all the web sites that mention John Smith AND mentions the word pilot. It's just a way to narrow your search to John Smith the pilot.
What about the - operator? A quick example is Abraham Lincoln. Try a search for "Abraham Lincoln" with the quotation marks. You should get about 44,200,000 returns. If you add the operator -president outside of the quotation marks, you'll reduce your returns to 27,400,000.
I'm using EXTREME examples here to show the dramatic differences when adding operators. The differences in your searches most likely won't be quite so profound, but should help you drill down to the person or persons or whatever data you're searching for.
Next we'll add a few more helpful hints such as OR and a few other quick tricks...
Stay tuned.
So here's the problem with "John Smith". If John is out there on the internet with either a middle initial or a full middle name, this simple search for "John Smith" with question marks isn't going to work to find them.
What do we do? The * and ? and other search tools are called "operators". The * ~ and ? are all operators as well as + and -.
If John MIGHT have a middle name, here's what you do: "John * Smith" ~genealogy. That search will return 208,000 responses, more that the 111,000 when we used only "John Smith". Why? Because the additional returns added all the entries that include something in between "John" and "Smith" in addition to "John Smith". Of course, I continued to add ~genealogy to keep the search focused on genealogy based search results.
I recommend using the * for a few reasons, even if you are 100000% sure that John's middle name was Morris. Why? Because in searching, you're subjected to how the indexing was done. Did the census taker hear "Morris" or "Norris". Or maybe the census worker got it right but the person who indexed the file read it wrong. Or it might even have been wrong in the first place. John Morris Smith more than likely isn't the person who told the census taker "John Morris Smith". Someone in the household or even a neighbor might have given the name as "John Alan Smith". It happens ALL THE TIME!!!
For those reasons and more, be aware that you're probably right... Let's say that John Morris Smith is, without even a shadow of a doubt, absolutely, positively your ancestor's correct name. You just can't be sure with how it was recorded then re-recorded then transcribed then indexed and then whatever!
Next, we'll start using the + and the - operators. Let's say you're ancestor was a pilot. You want to find the entries for the web sites about John Smith who was a pilot and not any others. Easy! Just add +pilot to your search. That way, the word pilot HAS to be in the web site somewhere. That doesn't mean you'll find John Smith the pilot, it just means that you're going to find all the web sites that mention John Smith AND mentions the word pilot. It's just a way to narrow your search to John Smith the pilot.
What about the - operator? A quick example is Abraham Lincoln. Try a search for "Abraham Lincoln" with the quotation marks. You should get about 44,200,000 returns. If you add the operator -president outside of the quotation marks, you'll reduce your returns to 27,400,000.
I'm using EXTREME examples here to show the dramatic differences when adding operators. The differences in your searches most likely won't be quite so profound, but should help you drill down to the person or persons or whatever data you're searching for.
Next we'll add a few more helpful hints such as OR and a few other quick tricks...
Stay tuned.
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