Friday, August 31, 2007

The New Genealogy Message Searcher

Chris Dunham of The Genealogue blog has created another research tool for family historians who want to search the Ancestry/Rootsweb and Genforum message boards.

He calls it The New Genealogy Message Searcher - it is a Google tool and it can be found at http://google.com/coop/cse?cx=008603050331564176105%3Axbhj5maths0

You can input your search terms and it finds messages on http://boards.rootsweb.cxom, http://boards.ancestry.com and http://genforum.genealogy.com These boards have specific surnames, localities (states, counties, some cities) and other special message boards.

If you are searching for another researcher who may have information on your ancestral families, this tool does it all in one-step. Each message board system has a similar search tool, but they are somewhat different between Rootsweb/Ancestry and Genforum.

This tool doesn't accept wild cards in names (which is good, since that would probably bring the servers down) - such as "car*". It will accept names or phrases in quotes and will limit the search, such as "david carringer". It will not accept a wild card * between two names or words (such as "david * carringer" but it will find a real initial between words (such as "david j carringer".

My only complaint about it is that it doesn't tell you how many matches there are - it gives you a list of 10 matches and then an endless number of additional pages (if there are many matches).

Thanks, Chris, for doing this. It works great and advances the researcher's toolbox. Read Chris' post introducing it here.

1 comment:

Janice said...

Wow, great search engine. Thanks Randy for bringing it to our attention.

Janice