Besides you might find out that your great great uncle was an ax murderer! Exciting! They are a very underrated resource for you to find stuff. Check out the Newspapers page on this site for much more information regarding searching newspapers. But how about newspapers? I have found new names of extended family members stated in newspaper obituaries and other articles just as much as finding a family together in a census. Have you looked beyond document collections? Sure census records are popular, and draft cards and naturalization, land, and immigration records too.This may have given me quite a few folks who didn’t have the correct surname – but all I needed was one! The right one! Do you combine searches and omit surnames? For example – if you can’t find the surname in a collection – do you search for the husband’s first name and the wife’s first name also, in a specific geographic area? As an example, since their surname was often mangled, I often searched for husband “Ben” and wife “Jennie” (with a blank surname) in California because that is where they lived.You will be surprised at what you will find. Yes, I said deliberately misspell search terms. So you need to be creative with your name searching by deliberately searching for names misspelled or using wildcard searches. They are generally recorded by someone else from first or second-hand (or worse) information. There are very few if any documents available online that were written by the ancestor themselves.
And then if there is an index created, it can be mistranscribed or mistyped. Do you do only exact searches? People who write down others’ names often write them wrong.Thousands of online collections are not named Ancestry or FamilySearch. Yes, these are huge resources, but just as everything isn’t online, all the online stuff isn’t in their collections either.
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