 19 March 1999 In this issue:
MyFamily.com offers a unique service to families and other close-knit groups with a free, private place to share and distribute family information on the Web. Your free website will include a calendar that provides a summary of important family events for the next 30 days (from the family calendar). Member profile information submitted when you set up your account is automatically added to the family calendar. Custom dates (such anniversaries, family reunions, family engagements) can be added and shared with all site members. Members can also optionally receive e-mail reminders of important dates. Sign up for your free MyFamily.com site at: http://www.myfamily.com/index.asp?ID=CAL DATABASES OF THE DAY(Free for 10 Days!) Boone County, Missouri, Obituaries, 1892-1901 Home to nearly 30,000 people in 1900, Boone County was created in 1820, just a year before Missouri became a state. At the turn of the century, the "Columbia Missouri Herald" was the most important newspaper of the county and the five nearby counties of Audrain, Callaway, Howard, Cooper, Monroe and Randolph. This database is a collection of nearly 6000 obituaries published in the newspaper between 1892 and 1901. Researchers will find the name of the deceased, date of birth or age, and the issue date of the obituary. In addition, the newspaper, in 1892, began running an "In History" section where obituaries from 1819-1841 were reprinted. Copies of the original newspaper can be obtained via inter-library loan from the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia for a nominal handling charge. To those seeking ancestors from Missouri in the late 1800's, this can be a useful source of information. Bibliography: Weant, Kenneth, comp. "Boone County, Missouri 5977 Deaths Reported in the Columbia Missouri Herald, 7 January 1892 - 30 December 1901, Vol. 2." Orem, UT: Ancestry, Inc., 1999. Missouri resources available in the Online Store: http://shop.ancestry.com/ancestry/bmissourib.html Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Obituaries, 1998-1999 (Update) Serving the diverse population in ""Valley of the Sun," the "Arizona Republic" is the state's largest newspaper. This database is a collection of some obituaries from the newspaper in 1998 and early 1999. Information provided often includes birth date and location, occupation, military service, surviving family members, and other biographical facts. Compiled by the UMI Company in connection with the newspaper, it contains nearly 200 records and nearly 1200 names. This database contains new material provided by the UMI Company and previously posted material under the title Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Obituaries, 1998. Arizona resources available in the Online Store: http://shop.ancestry.com/ancestry/barizonab.html
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MYFAMILY.COM WELCOMES ITS 500,000TH MEMBER OREM, UT-March 16, 1999-MyFamily.com (http://www.myfamily.com), a premier provider of free, private and secure family Web sites, today welcomed its 500,000th member. This membership milestone was achieved in an unprecedented 80 days - eight times faster than the successful GeoCities and 40 days under Talk City's current record. "MyFamily.com is providing a valuable resource, strengthening and improving family relationships for more than a half million individuals," said Brett Walker, MyFamily.com general manager. "We are pleased to know that so many people are taking advantage of MyFamily.com to overcome the reality of physical distances between family and friends." MyFamily.com continues to prove that technology does not have to depersonalize and seclude individuals, but actually can help bring families closer together. Rebecca Wagner has communicated with relatives in Sweden for the first time thanks to her MyFamily.com site. "Your Web site has given us the opportunity to get reacquainted with those [relatives] we have already known and to get to know those and see those (especially in Sweden) that some of us had never known," she said. "Thank you from the bottom of my heart." Bette Scavone organized an ongoing high school reunion on her MyFamily.com site. Features such as the newscenter, event calendar, instant messaging and e-mail have made this virtual reunion possible. "Classmates who were only acquaintances have become good friends through MyFamily.com," she said. "It has been wonderful seeing how MyFamily.com's technology has put our high school family in touch after all these years!" Interesting site statistics:
GEORGE G. MORGAN: "ALONG THOSE LINES . . ." "Using Search Engines" The Internet has changed the way we communicate and exchange information forever. In the short years since the first graphical Web browser was introduced in 1993, businesses and individuals have surged forward to publish materials on the World Wide Web (WWW) in the form of Web pages. Today, estimates of the number of distinct Web page addresses (also known as Universal resource Locators or URLs) range from 300 to 500 million, and the number increases by the tens of thousands every day. With this information explosion, there have been thousands of Web sites created that deal with genealogy and family history. Are you using the Web in your genealogical research? If so, do you know how to search for clues and pointers? In "Along Those Lines . . ." this week, I want to discuss the merits and limitations of using search engines, those powerful tools for locating information on the WWW, and point out several of the very best. WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE? Search engines are powerful tools for searching the Internet (most often the Web) for information using keywords and phrases. There are really two entities on the Web: directories and search engines. A directory is a compilation of Web addresses and descriptive information arranged into categories and subcategories, something like a reference library. Directories are compiled by human beings and represent someone's conscious decision to include a particular Web site in the directory and placing it in a category. The largest and most successful directory is Yahoo! at http://www.yahoo.com. It provides the ability to search its own contents. A failed search (one that yields no results from the directory's own content) often reverts to a search engine. A search engine, on the other hand, is an indexed compilation of Web pages collected from the WWW by mechanical 'scouts' known as robots, bots or spiders. Web page content is indexed using three key parts of a Web page:
2) META Tags - META tags are keywords defined by the author to help search engines index the page. A Web page about Native Americans might have META tags added for the terms Indian, Sioux, Cherokee, etc. (META tags are not shown on a Web page; they are hidden in the background and are seen only if you use your browser's View Source facility to see the HTML code used to write the Web page.) You should know that some Web authors attempt to force their Web pages to come up higher in ranking by the repetition of the same keyword in their META tags. The search engines are wise to this and, on encountering this 'spam factor,' may either ignore multiple uses of that keyword or ignore and bypass the META tags altogether. 3) Page Content - The text on every page and the file names of included graphics, sounds, and videos are indexed. So-called "stopper" words, such as articles (the, a, etc.), conjunctions (and, either, or, neither, nor) and prepositions (of, for, etc.) and punctuation are ignored. This site contains extensive reviews, evaluations, rankings and "hot- to-use-search-engines" articles.) Search engines also vary in the frequency at which their indexes are refreshed. Some are updated weekly and others as seldom as once a month or more. USING A SEARCH ENGINE Search engines are easy to use. Simply enter the URL of the search engine in your browser, press enter and wait for its Web page to load. Once there, you're presented with a small window in which you can type the word(s) for which you wish to search. Enter the word and press enter. The search engine will look through its database and present you with a search results list. The list will contain matches and will be ordered in a relevancy ranking sequence. In other words, the search engine will determine what it believes to be relevant matches to the word(s) or phrase you entered, and will rank the results from highest to lowest relevancy. Special Note: When entering words in a search engine, always enter them in lower case. Do not use any capital letters. Search engines are programmed to accept capitalized words or words with upper case letters in them and look for exact matches to them. That means that if you typed the surname Smith, the search engine would not match to any Web pages where the surname was typed as SMITH. If you type your search word in all lower case, the search engine will look for Smith, SMITH and any variations of upper and lower case and any mixed case. You can review the search results list and click on various links to go to those Web sites to review their Web page content. If the search results list seems too large or too broad, you can revise your search. One way of doing that is with a Boolean search. What's that? Well, English mathematician George Boole developed a means of evaluating materials on a simple true-false scale using conditions. You'll perhaps remember this from your math classes. You evaluate materials based on the use of AND, OR, and NOT. Some search engines will also support proximity of words to one another using NEAR. Let's look at an example. Let's say you were searching for information about the census in Virginia. I used Hotbot and entered the search words virginia census, and was presented with 33,990 matches. Next, I used the same words and specified in the 'search these results' area that I wanted the words to be treated as an exact phrase (words must be side by side in precisely this order). This search resulted in 330 matches. Unfortunately, however, there were Web pages included for West Virginia. I then specified in the 'search these results' area that I wanted to use a Boolean phrase, and I changed my search terms to read as follows: census AND virginia NOT "west virginia" You will note that I enclosed west virginia in quotes. This has the effect of making west virginia an exact phrase. This time I was presented with 22,390 matches, still a large number to review. Next, I decided that what I really wanted to find were Web pages about the census in Virginia and NOT about the census in West Virginia. I decided to try another version of the Boolean search, and this time I entered the following two exact phrases: "virginia census" NOT "west virginia census" This had the effect of saying, "Give me Web pages that include the descriptiven phrase "virginia census" but screen out any pages that include the exact phrase "west virginia census" in them." As a result, I was presented with 310 matches. The gist of this is that you often will start with a general search and then proceed to refine your search, perhaps several times, until you find information you want and/or in the volume you can reasonably handle. When searching for Web pages containing genealogical information about a surname, I suggest that you use a Boolean phrase that looks like the following: smith AND genealogy This will help limit your search to Web pages containing each of these words, and will help screen out 8th-grader Mikey Smith's personal Web page. Special Note: When entering search words and phrases, you will want to avoid the use of plurals because the search engine will look specifically for the plural version. If you enter a singular version of a word, such as bear instead of bears, the search engine will present you with pages that include the words bear and bears. Also, if you are searching for a word whose plural changes the spelling of the word, consider truncating the word. As an example, a search for the word butterfly would yield fewer results than butterfl. In addition, many search engines (not Hotbot today) will allow you to use an asterisk to indicate a 'wild card' substitution. Typing search term butterfl* would yield both butterfly and butterflies. Typing gr*y would yield pages with the words grey and/or gray. Search engines' main screens always present you with the most simple search facility. Be on the lookout for links to what they may refer to as Advanced Search or Custom Search. These pages will provide you with addition search options that may help you further refine your searches. THE BEST SEARCH ENGINES The following is a list of some of the most reliable and respected search engines on the Internet today. The list is far from complete, and there are other international and specialized search engines that may be of help to you too. You will find a large list of these at http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Searchin g_the_Web/Search_Engines/ at the Yahoo Web site. (Be sure to paste the second line of this URL into your browser.)
AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com)
For more information about search engines and details about many of them,
please refer to Mecklermedia's Web site regarding search engines at:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com USING WEB PAGES FOUND IN SEARCH ENGINES As with any other non-original record, we have to use what we find in the Web pages as pointers to primary records. They can provide huge amounts of new resources, but they cannot replace the use of the genuine article for review and corroboration. Even graphics of original documents should be viewed with some skepticism because they may be less clear than the original or may even have been altered. Take nothing for granted; always maintain that healthy curiosity and skepticism. If you haven't used search engines, get in there and discover the treasures in those Web pages. If you're already using search engines, invest the time to learn more about the ones you're using so that you are a better researcher. Happy hunting! George The article originally appeared in the Genealogy Forum on America Online. You may send E-mail to alonglines@aol.com. George Morgan would like to hear from you but, because of the volume of E-mail, is unable to personally respond to each letter individually. He also regrets that he cannot assist you with your personal genealogical research. George is also the author of "The Genealogy Forum on America Online." Learn how to use one of the world’s most important and respected online genealogical resources. George Morgan’s Users Guide will help beginning to advanced genealogists utilize all the Forum has to offer! http://shop.ancestry.com/ancestry/genforonamon.html
ANCESTRY.COM FAMILY HISTORY FAVORITE AWARDS In recognition of excellence in providing the genealogical community with these valuable research tools, Ancestry.com is happy to announce the following "Family History Favorites."
The UK & Ireland Genealogical Information Service (GENUKI)
Fianna Guide to Irish Research This award is presented every Wednesday to sites that provide valuable information to researchers.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1804-1881
PRODUCT OF THE DAY AT THE ONLINE STORE
Normally "Where Once We Walked" retails for $69.50, but today you can buy it in the Online Store for only $41.70. "If you haven't checked PERSI, you haven't done your research . . . period." - Patricia Law Hatcher, CG
There is no better time to buy! Stay tuned for more savings!
Best Wishes,
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"Where Once We Walked: A Guide to the Jewish Communities Destroyed in the
Holocaust,"