New Search Tool Released!

You may have noticed that my posting has been sparse this last week. This is because I have been working on a tool that assists in conducting a relatively exhaustive search for your ancestors. I took inspiration from the wonderful spreadsheets released by Gary Minder’s CensusTools, one of which was the research log. It listed dozens of great places to search for your ancestors online.

I thought I would take the idea one step further and allow you to search all these sites (and a couple more) from one central location. The tool I created allows you to type in the name of your ancestor, and click a link for the site you want to search. The search will be conducted for you on most of the sites, saving you from typing the name out dozens of times. The sites where it was not feasible or intuitive to search automatically are indicated with (Manual Search), and I have provided a link to the home page or search page of that site. You have an option for opening most of the sites in an iframe on the page (unless the site has code that breaks it), or in a new window/tab. When you click the link for each site, a box will be checked, helping you keep track of where you have searched already.

Let me know if I should include any other sites in the list. I plan on adding more as I think of them. I also would like to expand the search parameters to include dates and locations, which some of the sites accept. Take it for a test drive and tell me what you think! I hope this proves useful!