Thursday, July 19, 2012

Genealogy (Love of the Hunt)

Have you ever searched the census and said, what does that say?   You just can't read the shorthand of early census takers..   They used some obvious shorthand, like jno = john.   Does that make sense?  Thos = Thomas.   After 30 years of reading the censuses, I am still learning.

Newspapers (historical) lets you search but uses OCR (optical character recognition)  What is OCR?  Example, type a keyword like Robert Glasgow, and it looks for Robert and Glasgow which, of course,  is going to bring up thousands of unnecessary information and is very unreliable.  If you search twice it will bring up different information each time.   If you are looking for a death notice, use the date and then search within.   Try putting the whole name in quotes “robert glasgow” and hopefully it will bring up only the Robert Glasgow's’ you need.  Just a tip, Newton County LIbrary has access to historical newspapers on microfilm in their Heritage Room. cga

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