Presented by Michael Nettleton
90-Minute Enhanced Presentation (Intermediate)
Some of us have brick walls — others are missing major bricks. Michael has an impressive record of finding records that other researchers have missed. His presentation will share strategies for finding records that just don’t surface from typical searches — and the unique characteristics of the major information providers that you can exploit for better results — and how records across these providers can differ. Using broad examples, this will cover:
- The basics of searching — wildcards, operators, common mistranscriptions, precedence amongst terms
- Beyond the basics:
- what breaks / aids searches in specific data sets, and how to determine
- common transcriber mistakes (beyond letter substitutions)
- reading script in older records
- eliminating multiple possible matches by negation (time permitting)
- Breakthrough strategies
- when and how to go beyond the search engine
- understand when disparate results may BE a match
- understand when identical results may NOT be a match
- exercises
Information providers used as examples will include: Ancestry and Newspapers.com; Archive.org; AutomatedGenealogy; Findmypast and British Newspaper Archive; FamilySearch.
