“How do you research online?” was the question posed in a recent issue of Dick Eastman’s free online newsletter at www.eogn.com.
He pointed out that the staffs of various online genealogy databases have analyzed the differences in the ways newcomers research online versus the pros. They assume the pros come up with better results because they research in a more effective manner, although there are no statistics to prove it.
Newcomers apparently try to research everything at the same time, while a pro would choose one database or record group to research, and then go to another.
If we are lucky, we are researching someone with an unusual name and thus are pretty well assured we are getting results for that person, but not everyone has such good fortune. Eastman said that by researching everything at once, you might get too many hits, be overwhelmed and thus lose interest.
The moral is to do a better job of making your searches more specific in order to find information that is really helpful. I have found that a lot turns up on an initial general search that can get in the way of going back to the specific genealogy databases, such as Ancestry.com or Familysearch.org. Placing a query on a county-based site, such as the free USgenweb site, cannot hurt. In fact, you should place a query wherever you can, and hopefully someone will get in touch.
Columbia County records
“Early Court Records of Columbia County, Georgia, 1792-1840” was first published in the 1970s by Georgia Pioneers of Albany, an early genealogy publisher. It was the work of the late F.F. “Pearl” Baker of Thomson.
The new edition has the same surname-only index. Given the valuable information contained in these court records, it’s good to see the book back in print, even though the exact books and page numbers are not cited.
It is available for $23.50 plus $5 postage from Southern Historical Press, P.O. Box 1267, Greenville, SC 29602. See their full catalog at www.southernhistoricalpress.com.
Jewish anthology
Avotaynu, a long-running journal of Jewish genealogy, recently announced the publication of an anthology — covering 1985-2011, 105 issues and nearly 7,000 pages. It’s offered for $35 as an online database. See www.avotaynu.com for details.
