Monday, October 14, 2013

Doing a Global Surname Search on Mocavo.com for Free

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 wrote Finding Mocavo.com Record Collections for Free Searching last Friday in order to help readers find the content on Mocavo.com.  

Today, I want to use Mocavo.com to search for FREE records starting from the Home Page on www.Mocavo.com using a global surname search.  Here is the Home Page screen:


The form shown on the Home Page is to register for a Free account (or a Gold account if you wish).

There is al ink for "See All Search Fields" but I could not get to it with a free unregistered account.
I clicked on the "Search" link in the top menu and went to the Search page and entered the surname "seaver" in the Last Name field:



I could check or uncheck the boxes for "Nicknames & Alternates" for the first name or "Similar spellings" for the last name:

The search engine returned over 93,000 matches in the Mocavo database, listed 10 at a time:


I don't know what the priority is for displaying the search results.  It will take me a long time to search through 93,000 matches.  However, there are "Categories" on the left side of the screen above and I could choose one of them to filter out the other record types.  I'll do that in the next post.

I decided to click on the first match on the screen above - it's for a Henry Seaver entry in the Social Security Death Index.  I clicked on the name on the match list and saw:


The first time I clicked on a record in the match list, I get the popup advertising above.  If I X out of it, I get to the previous screen, and clicking "Search" again, I get another popup and when I X out of that, I can see the match list for the database.

A better alternative is to click on "Search that database here for free."  When I click on that, I see the database search fields without anything filled in:


The search form for the database offers more variety than the global search form.

I added the name "henry" and "seaver" to the search fields above and clicked on the "SSDI Search" button:


That gave me a list of all of the Henry Seaver persons in the SSDI.  I could click on the "Modify This Search" link above the matches to modify my search.

I clicked on the first match on the screen above and saw:


The transcribed record for Henry Seaver appeared on the screen.

The system works, and it is FREE (without a free or paid registration), but there are some extraneous clicks and data entry required:

*  To get out of the popup screens
*  To search a specific database after I've clicked on a record to see, I have to re-enter data into the search fields, then lcick again

I wonder about the completeness of the Social Security Death Index database available to Mocavo.  I received 546 matches for an exact last name of "seaver."  When I use the search engine on Ancestry.com, I have 1,428 matches with exact matches checked.  On GenealogyBank, I have 1,427 matches.

In the next post, I will search for a specific person in a specific Category in the free searches.

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Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver



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