Thursday, March 15, 2007

Searching the Rootsweb/Ancestry Mailing List Archives

It has been very difficult to search the mailing list archives at Rootsweb/Ancestry in the past - you had to go year-by-year in a specific mailing list, or use Google to find archived mailing list posts.

Rootsweb has made the search much easier - see the Rootsweb Newsroom post at http://bigfile.rootsweb.com/newsroom/?p=70. They have developed a specific search engine for the mailing lists at http://archiver.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/search?aop.

Make sure that you click on the Advanced Search tab.

In the Advanced Search box, you can find words in the body of a message or in the title of a message, and limit the search to a specific author of a message (by inputting their email address), or on a specific mailing list, or on a certain date.

There are no wild card search capabilities, so you have to input specific words or phrases. It does accept a specific phrase in quote marks - like "cornelia bresee".

This is a major improvement to the search capability on Rootsweb, and is long overdue. Hopefully, they will improve it even more - I would love to have a search between specific post dates, before a specific post date, or after a specific post date.

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