Friday, June 18, 2010

Finding Nathaniel Wade's Wife's Name Online - Post 3

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In the first post of this series, Nathaniel Wade (1709-1754) married Ruth (who?) in 1731? I described my evidence and conclusions that the maiden name of Ruth was Hawkins rather than Hopkins, which appeared in Volume 3 of James Arnold's Vital Records of Rhode Island, 1636-1850. In the second post, Finding Nathaniel Wade's Wife's Name Online - Post 2, I went through trying to find online text and database information about the marriage.

In this post, I'm going to survey the online commercial database services for the marriage of Nathaniel Wade in the 21 volumes of James Arnold's Vital Records of Rhode Island.

My first thought was that the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) (www.NewEnglandAncestors.org) would have the database, and I was right. However, they have transcriptions of the entries, and not images. I put Nathaniel Wade in the search fields, then selected Vital Records, and then Vital Records of Rhode Island, and saw this screen:




The marriage of Nathaniel Wade and Ruth Hopkins is the fourth item on the list. If you click on the "More" link in the screen above you can see all of the entries on the specific page with the search result entry. You can also advance page by page in the book.

Next, I checked World Vital Records. I put Nathaniel Wade in the search fields, and selected the Vital Records of Rhode Island from the list, and then found the match for Nathaniel Wade. The specific page from the book was displayed as an image. I could go backwards or forwards in the book using the arrows next to the page number:




Next was Ancestry.com. I used the Card Catalog to find the Vital Records of Rhode Island by Arnold (it wasn't easy, I finally searched the site for "Vital Record of Rhode Island" - the database book title is not spelled correctly!), then searched for Nathaniel Wade (exact, including similar meanings and spelling). There were 12 matches - the screen below shows some of them:




None of the 12 matches were for the marriage record of Nathaniel Wade and Ruth Hopkins in Scituate, RI. I know it's there, because I've found it in the NEHGS and WVR sites! I clicked on the fourth one down (the children of Nathaniel and Ruth in Scituate) and then used the page number field to browse until I found the record on page 30 of the book:



I wonder why it didn't find this page in the search, because the type is very clear. Did they not index every name in the book? I put "Ruth Hopkins" in the search fields and got:



Two matches, and it did not find the marriage record for Ruth Hopkins and Nathaniel Wade. What's up with this? It appears that the ONLY way to find reliable information in this particular database is to browse the 21 volumes rather than search them. That works fine, but is pretty slow. Are these index and/or search problems only for this database? Or is it worse than that - and nobody knows which databases have complete indexes?

The database page for the "Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850" is here. There is a nice list of the volumes and their subject areas on the right hand panel, as shown in the screen below:




So Ancestry.com does have the page images, but the index doesn't find all instances of a name. Therefore, the index is pretty useless, at least for this particular database.

In summary, for James Arnold's 21 volume series on Vital Records of Rhode Island, 1636-1850:

* www.WorldVitalRecords.com has an accurate index and page images
* www.Ancestry.com has the book page images, but the index is useless.
* www.NewEnglandAncestors.org (NEHGS) has an accurate index and transcriptions, but no book page images.

Are there other online searchable databases for James Arnold's Vital Records of Rhode Island, 1636-1850 volumes? If so, please tell me!

The lesson learned here is that researchers need to beware of Ancestry.com book databases - this may not be the only one that has index problems.

1 comment:

Robyn said...

I've enjoyed this series of posts immensely. Really shows how methodical one needs to be in research, and how you've got to evaluate each source and then put the information all together. Great post to illustrate research methodology!