Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Doing a Free Specific Name Search on Mocavo.com

Mocavo.com made a major announcement last week concerning their record collections and free access to them.  You can read it at Mocavo Introduces Free Forever - Join Us in the Revolution, by Cliff Shaw.

I posted Finding Mocavo.com Record Collections for Free Searching last Friday in order to help readers find the content on Mocavo.com.  I also wrote Doing a Global Surname Search on Mocavo.com for Free yesterday to show the process.

Today, I want to search for a specific name (first and last) on Mocavo.com to get some idea of the range of databases available.

I entered Given Name = Frederick and Last Name = Seaver in the search fields on the Mocavo.com Search page (not the Home Page), and checked the "Nicknames & Alternates" box:




The search found 828 results for the search request.  Here are the first 10 of them (four screens shown):





 There are many more pages of matches.  Here is a summary of the first 20 matches:

*  3 Social Security Death Index entries
*  "The Whitney Family of Connecticut..." book
*   "History of the Third Pennsylvania Reserve ..."
*   "Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York..."
*   "Through Three Centuries - Colver and Rosenberger..."
*   "The History of Ashburnham, Mass..."
*  "Trow Business Directory of the Boroughs of Manhattan..."
*  "Annual Report Town of Harrisville, New Hampshire..."
*  Find A Grave.com
*  2 Genforum.Genealogy.com entries
*  "Supplement to the General Register of the Society of Colonial Wars..."
*  3 "Journal of the House of Representatives of Commonwealth of Massachusetts..." entries
*   "Evening Journal Almanac (Volume 1895)"
*  "Cauldron, Northeastern University, 1937"
*  "Our Rival, The Rascal..."

I won't bore you with the other 808 matches!  I won't waste my time doing it either.

I was intrigued by the last match on the list, so I clicked on the title for that match and faced:


The dreaded advertisement for Mocavo Gold.  I Xed out of that and a new window tab opened and I was at the search form for that specific database with blank search fields.  I filled out the search fields with Frederick Seaver:


I clicked the green "Search" button and saw:


That is what I saw in the list of matches for the first search performed:


The index told me (further down the screen above) that the match for "Frederick Seaver " was on page 180 of this document.

I entered page numbers into the page number field and found it on page 150:


It was at the bottom of the page (not shown) and it was for "Frank L. Seaver" not for "Frederick Seaver."  It appears that the search for names in newspapers and books is an OCR search that considers proximity for the requested names/words and not contiguity for a name.  No worry - it was what I was looking for!

As we saw in the previous post, the Free search results in a popup ad for Mocavo Gold every time you access a new database, and you have to enter the information into the search fields again.

When I am finished with this specific database, I can go back to the open Window tab for the overall search results.

As I said before - this is a bit unwieldy and redundant, but it works and finds results by name.  As advertised.

In the next post, I'll look at the same search process for Frederick Seaver.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/10/doing-free-specific-name-search-on.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I tried following your steps for "Doing a Free Specific Name Search on Mocavo. I used my ancestor's name and then I tried your ancestor's name. After clicking on the "Rascal" title, I "Xd" the Mocavo Gold ad but a separate tab to search didn't show up. I tried this while signed in with Mocavo Basic membership and then again, not signed in. Do you have any idea what is happening?