It’s been over a year since Ancestry.com unveiled its popular Ranked Search to add to its traditional Exact Search. If genealogy is like finding a needle in a haystack, you can think of Ranked Search as a way to dig through less hay and find more of those precious needles.
North American cities are more ethnically diverse than any other urban centers in the world: New Orleans has its celebrated French Quarter. Chicago houses Germantown. San Francisco’s Chinatown is famous. And New York City has historically been a gathering place for immigrants of many ethnic backgrounds. These ethnic urban centers are not the result of chance or of civic diversification programs.
In 1990, Steven Covey formulated the ground-breaking list of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” They are: 1) be proactive, 2) begin with the end in mind, 3) put first things first, 4) think win-win, 5) seek first to understand, then to be understood, 6) synergize, and 7) sharpen the saw. Let’s see how these habits apply to us as genealogists.
1. Be proactive.
Google TM has won the search engine wars, for the time being. Its complete text search functionality for its database of over 4 billion webpages has made Google extremely popular. Last year, the search engine processed more than 112 million search requests per day. This year, Google accounts for forty percent of all Internet searches performed in the United States.
As I have researched family history over the past few years, I have discovered three things that make the research process both interesting and rewarding: 1) solving a difficult problem, 2) locating new information about ancestors that no one knew was available, and 3) meeting new people who share a common interest in family history.
It is a biological fact that we have an equal number of male and female ancestors. Yet it is an historic truth that there are never as many records for the females as the males in our ancestry. It’s the reason we reach so many dead ends and leave more barren branches on the right side of our family tree than the left.
What do you do when you discover that for forty years of your great-grandparents’ married lives they lived in a place 1,200 miles away from your own home?
First, do as much research as you can from home. Be sure you search for history and information of that area in your local library. Then check online resources including Ancestry.com and the library catalog at FamilySearch.
It is a thrill to hold an original early seventeenth- or eighteenth-century document. Perhaps it is a will bequeathing a few teaspoons, a handful of utensils, and meager household goods.
Millions of document pages exist in Spanish archives, a reality that is both enticing and intimidating for anyone searching for Hispanic ancestors. But understanding how to access and use Spain’s wealth of records can give even a novice researcher —working from either side of the ocean—the promise of successfully tracing family lines.
Point. Click. Send.
Computers and the Internet have revolutionized the way families communicate. E-mail, Voice Chat, and webcams make it easy for people to keep in touch. In days-gone-by, a family gathering often meant a Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house or a leisurely visit with a favorite aunt who lived nearby.