Avoid Memory

One of the “big” genealogy sites recently announced an update to a database for a state where I have a handful of relatives. Instead of reviewing the information on those relatives in my database and then conducting some searches, I immediately began conducting searches.

That was a mistake.

The “search right now” approach to get immediate results may be tempting, but it can be easy for the researcher to forget key details, mix up names, overlook some relatives, etc. All this does is end up wasting time and cause information to be overlooked.

Always go back and review details about people before searching for them. That little bit of time spent could result in more time being saved.