Thursday, April 7, 2016

MyHeritage Book Matching Payoff: William Rufus Seaver (1822-1898) Life Sketch

I spent some time today trying to figure out my best research practices for the MyHeritage Book Matches, and I had a quick payoff.

I think that it is easiest to focus on one person at a time for the Book Matches.  I tried using the Book Matches on the Record Match list, but with over 20,000 of them, most of them were for people in my MyHeritage tree who are not my ancestors or really persons of much interest.  When I started searching for specific people in the "Compilation of Published Sources" collection on MyHeritage, I had useful results.

I started searching for some of my distant Seaver cousins.  For instance, here is my search for William Rufus Seaver (1822-1898) in this collection of over 447,000 books and other published sources.

1)  In the search fields for the name, I entered First and Middle Names = "William Rufus" and Last Name = "Seaver", and I added a Keyword = 'Montreal."  I also made all fields "Exact":


2)  After clicking the "Search" button, I received 12 matches:


3)  Down the list a bit was a match for "The Congregational Churches Yearbook, 1899" with a short life sketch for William Rufus Seaver (three screens shown, no overlap):

The match includes a snippet of the text, followed by the image of the page from the book, the source information, and then the OCR text rendition of the page.  I highlighted the paragraph for William Rufus Seaver.

I could have captured the book page image by right-clicking the image and saving it as a JPG file.

4)  I copied the OCR text rendition to determine how good the OCR rendition was.  Here is the copied text:

"Seaver, William Rufus, son of Heman and Sarah C. (Rice) Seaver, was
born in Montreal, 1822, July 11. For years in business. Ordained, Smyrna,
Mich., 1869, March 31; acting pastor, Sedalia, Mo., 1870-2; Muskegon, Mich.,
1872-9; St. Joseph, Mo., 1880-1; Traverse City, Mich., 1882-6; Pontiac,
1886-90; Saugatuck and Douglas, 1891-4; without charge, and acting pastor
of Presbyterian church, Ellsworth, Kan., after. Married, 1842, April 26, I^ehltable,
 daughter of Linus aud Betsey (Bond) Homer, of Brlmfleld, Mass. Of
five children, two daughters and two sons living, one of the latter being Rev.
Charles H. Seaver. Died of meningeal apoplexy, 1898. Sept. 22, aged 76
years, 2 months, and 11 days."

The OCR requires minimal editing.  I added it to my Notes for William Rufus Seaver in RootsMagic along with attribution of the source.

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1 comment:

Ancestor Archaeology said...

Perfect timing! I needed to go back and find a source that I failed to note "back in the day" when I first started my genealogy adventure. It was on the top of my to-do list for today. I opened your post, tried the book search and voila! First thing that came up was the source I was looking for! The genealogy fairies were smiling upon me today - thanks for the timely post!