It’s Saturday night, which means it’s time for Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge as posted at Genea-Musings. The mission this week is to:
1)Â Go to genea-blogger Randy Majors website (http://www.randymajors.com/).
2)Â Add his blog to your RSS reader, if you don’t have it already.
3) Read his blog post AncestorSearch using Google Custom Search – BETA. See the link at the top of the page that says “AncestorSearch using Google Custom Search – BETA?” Click on it.
4) Test out his Custom Google Search form to help you find online information about your ancestors, especially for their marriages.Â
5) Tell us about your results – was this useful? Did you find something new? How can Randy improve it?
6)Â If you like Randy’s Custom Search, add it to your Bookmarks or Favorites.
Having done 1-4, here are my results for 5:
I started by searching for Dionysia Ansted’s marriage to Thomas Burton, since those are the lines I’m currently working on. The only hit I got was for 123people.co.uk and it linked back to one of my own posts. That didn’t really surprise me since I’ve found very little for them online previously. A search for Dionysia’s parents’ marriage also turned up nothing.
I decided to try a different line just to see if the results would be better.
I chose to search for William Davey (Davy) and Sarah Neal (Neil). The first two hits were for my own blog, but the fourth result was for a rootsweb page I had not seen before relating to marriages in Peel County, Ontario in 1905. It was not for William and Sarah’s marriage, but for the marriage of their daughter Elizabeth Davey to David Locker. Interestingly, that is not who I have Elizabeth marrying and some of the other information – like her age at marriage – has me scratching my head. I haven’t spent a much time on the Daveys beyond my direct line, but I guess I will have to now – there’s a mystery to solve!
Finally, I decided to search for Henrietta Salter and John Fee. The only results I found were from my own webpage. So I went back one generation and tried Thomas Fee and Charlotte Williams. A couple of the early results were from my blog but there were also results from a genealogy.com forum and a query from the Quebec Family Histories Society. I may actually try contacting the posters despite the fact they are older queries – one never knows.
All in all, Randy’s search form seems to work quite well and I intend to spend some more time experimenting with it. Thanks to both Randys for this challenge!
