Internet Genealogy Assistance
Have you struggled to find anything online pertaining to your ancestry? Well, I have slowly discovered tricks and sites over the last year that have certainly helped me. Since I know of no site to direct users to all Internet genealogy sources, I have decided to make one. I'm currently offering three main areas of assistance:
A Keyboard Trick Search Engines Genealogy Databases
If you can offer me any information or ways that I can help you, please do not hesitate to contact me.  Thanks for coming.
A Keyboard Trick
        When viewing long documents, finding just what you're looking for can be a pain.  But this can be alleviated by using a simple key stroke:

• Hold down the "Control" button (possibly the 'cloverleaf' button on the Mac) and push "F".

This activates the in-page find option, giving you a box to fill in what you are looking for.  Just type in your word or words and click "Search".  Don't stop till you've found what you want or it says "Search String Not Found".  It can be incredibly helpful and save hours of laborious reading (not to mention electricity bills!)

Note:  This may not work on AOL Netfind!
       If this is the case, you can get the same results from Excite, which is what Netfind uses.

Search Engines
Search More Precisely!    Search 15 Search Engines At Once!    Search Several Engines In A Single Place!
 A good way to find information online is by using search engines.  Simply type in your word or words and click the search (or whatever they call it!) button.  Many tricks are involved with these, including:

• putting a phrase in double quotes (" "); this will cause the search engine to search for that particular phrase
• on the Infoseek search engine, simply capitalizing two consecutive words will serve the same purpose as double quotes, but it doesn't work for more than two
• putting a plus sign (+) without spaces between two or more words; the search engine will only find pages where both of these words are present
• doing the same with a minus sign; the search engine will find all pages with the first word, removing all pages with the minused word; this cuts down on results if you have too many

And now the fun part!  I am creating links to as many search engines as I can find!  If you know of more, please e-mail me and tell me where I can find them!  I will give you credit for pointing me in their direction if you request it!  Here goes my collection:

• www.dogpile.com  I know it doesn't sound very appealing, but it is an excellent site for Internet searching because its search engine searches several other search engines.  This means that you can search a more complete segment of the Internet with a single search, saving you immense amounts of time and perhaps pointing you to engines you had never even heard of.  This fantastic website searches:

            LookSmart
            Goto.com
            Thunderstone
            Yahoo
            Dogpile Open Directory
            Mining Co.
            Webcrawler
            Lycos' A2Z
            Excite Guide
            What U Seek
            Magellan
            Lycos
            InfoSeek
            Excite
            AltaVista

        If you've heard of all these, then I should probably be asking you for help!

• The Netscape Netcenter (home.netscape.com)  This site gives a list box of different searches, including:

                Looksmart (I haven't used this much)
                Netscape (uses Excite; don't use both because you will receive the same results)
                Excite (an extremely popular search engine)
                Infoseek (one of the best to find info)
                Lycos (another extremely popular search engine)
                SNAP (I haven't used this much either)
                GoTo (I am not familiar with this one)
                Open Directory (I'm not familiar with this one either)

Using Netcenter will save you the time of having to go to each engine's individual web site.  Saving some time can be crucial!

I'm looking for more as we speak!  But I think I'm off to a good start!

Genealogical Databases

        Absolutely critical to genealogy research is the genealogical database!  I know of four right now (I can only think of two at the moment):

• Familysearch.org    This site offers free roaming of the largest genealogy database in the world, put together by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also called the Mormon Church.  It presents you with a form to fill in, and it will find different spellings of what you type in (exs.  Wilcox:  Willcox, Willcocks; Sarah:  Sally, Sallie).  Because of this feature and the fact that it's free, I rate it number one.  It has many options besides the initial one that I have not explored.  Occasionally, it will go down for maintenance, but this usually only lasts a day.
• Ancestry.com    This site offers free roaming to some areas but paid membership is required to gain full access.  Among the free areas are the World Family Tree, which is very useful, but it takes exactly what you type, and the Social Security Death Index, also very useful, but only good for the last fifty years or so.  This index includes what the person put on his or her form and may not have middle or maiden names.

These can be of great use in Internet genealogy.

For any additions, please e-mail me.  I will credit you with the find if you want!

Thanks for stopping by!  Best of luck to you in your searches!

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