Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Using GenealogyBank - Post 4: More Databases

In Using GenealogyBank - Post 1: Getting Started, I described the GenealogyBank subscription site and started a search. Using GenealogyBank - Post 2: Seeing Search Results, described and demonstrated how the results look and how to save them and print them. Post 3:More Navigation Options showed easy ways to navigate within the Historical Newspapers collection.

In this post, I'm going to use the Navigation links on the left side of the Search and Results screens to check out the other collections. The America's Obituaries matches for Thomas Seaver is shown below:


The state, date of publication and newspaper title are shown with the link to the obituary.

Clicking on the "Historical Books" link in the left frame produces one match:


There were 40 matches in the "Historical Documents" collection, and these are provided with 10 matches per page:


The Social Security Death Index is FREE for anybody on GenealogyBank - and they claim that it is updated weekly and is the most up-to-date SSDI available. There were 5 matches for Thomas Seaver:


I clicked on one of the SSDI entries, and saw this summary:


The SSDI results obtained are similar to other websites:

* Name
* Date of Birth
* Date of Death
* Age at Death
* Last Known Residence (including state, county, city, zip code, latitude, longitude)
* Social Security details (state issued, SS number)

The SSDI page has a helpful box in the middle of the page - it says "Continue Discovering Your Family's Past" with links to obituaries, historical newspapers and a search of all GenealogyBank databases. That's smart marketing!

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