Overwhelmed by common names like Smith or Jones in your family tree? This presentation offers advanced strategies and techniques to help you effectively use FamilySearch’s full-text search and find those elusive ancestors.
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Full-Texting the Smiths and Jones:
Strategies for Common Names
Using FamilySearch’s Full-Text search is easier when the name is relatively uncommon. It’s more of a challenge when the last name is Smith, Jones, Brown, or something similarly common. In this presentation, we will look at approaches to maximize the chance you find that common-named person. No approach is full-proof and we will not be so brazen to guarantee success. No genealogist should ever do that.
What we will do is help give you some ideas and techniques to give you a better shot at finding your commonly named person. We can lead you through some examples and give you some ideas to modify to search for your own people. We will assume you’ve got an understanding of how full-text search works. This presentation will not cover the basics of using the full-text search functionality of FamilySearch (you can watch our first presentation for that—nearly two hours and an extensive handout).
The Smith-Jones presentation will cover:
Identifying all the key elements that distinguish your ancestor from others. Your ancestor is more than a name. Crafting as detailed an ancestral profile as possible facilitates the construction of effective searches and we will see how to elicit as many of those details as possible from records you already have.
Organizing a search strategy. Making certain all relevant search combinations have been searched is key to maximizing the chance you find your commonly named ancestor. We will see how to create your own forms and outlines to do just that.
Tracking Results to Problem-Solve. Searching for common names requires the researcher to be as methodological as possible to make certain all options have been considered. It is impossible to determine if all effective means of search were used if negative results tracking is not done.
The Name’s the Thing. Last names such as Bird, Lake, and Farmer have their own issues as well. We will see some approaches that can help locate these names.
Case Studies. We will look at sample case studies common-named persons.
Please note: We can’t guarantee success. What we can do is help to give you tools to increase your chances of success with common names.
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