Remembering What You’ve Searched - Wed, 27 Mar 2024

Do you often go to a genealogy site and do a specific search (e.g. surnames and places) for your family records? And then do you go back a few weeks later and search for the same information again because you forgot that you searched for it a few weeks ago? And then do you go back a month later and search again because you wanted to see if there’s anything new thinking you last did that search 6 months ago?

One of our big timewasters can be doing the same search over and over. We as genealogists want to be organized and search our favorite indexes in a systematic manner. We don’t want to miss anything and we want to be efficient at it.

Sure, every so often we’ll go off on a wild goose chase searching down some rabbit holes, and that’s okay. We need a bit of fun, and sometimes that can result in a gem or two. But we don’t want random searching to be our raison d’être.

Everyone has their own favorite search sites, be it MyHeritage, Ancestry, FamilySearch, BillionGraves, Newspaper sites, and hundreds of others. Each has a similar but slightly different search tool.

A few months ago, JewishGen, one of the most useful resources for my own genealogy research, started adding a lot of indexed records from the towns in the Ukraine that my ancestors are from. I knew I needed to check what they had and compare those with the records I acquired over the past few years from my Ukraine researcher Boris Makalsky to see what’s new that I don’t have.

I wanted to do this in a rigorous manner and a way that I’d know exactly what I searched for and also what it was I found that was relevant to my family.

Searching on JewishGen

I’ve been using JewishGen for many years. They have a very nice unified search that provides results from all of their many database indexes. A simple version of their search is available on their home page and looks like this:

The first two dropdown boxes allow you to choose between Surname, GivenName, Town or Any Field. Lara Diamond wrote an article “Tips to Find Relatives on JewishGen” explaining the best ways to use the JewishGen search.

For me, I found my best way was to use the simple search and search for a combination of my ancestral surname and the town they lived in. For example, searching for the surname “Dubovy” in the town of “Zhitomir”, JewishGen returns  the result below. (Click on any image for a larger version).

This search returns 99 matches from 9 databases on JewishGen plus 64 records on Yad Vashem that aren’t included in the 99 number. Clicking on the “List xxx records” buttons on the right will bring up the search results for each database. e.g. the 26 results from the Marriage Group 3 database start off like this:

Keeping Track, Avoiding Re-Searching

I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of my searches. Each column would be the surname and town I would search followed by the date I last did this search and the number of search results JewishGen said it found.

On the left, I would list each of the databases that JewishGen had results for me in my searches.

The intersecting squares would have the number of search results for the search listed in the column and the database in the row. The cells with relevant results would be white and the others would be yellow.

The total number of records found (less Yad Vashem) would be summed in row 5 and I could easily compare it with the number in row 4 which was the total that the search said there were.

The last time I had done this Dubovy Zhitomir search as you can see from the spreadsheet was March 23 or which was just 4 days ago. Normally, I wouldn’t do a search 4 days after I previously did it since results usually would be the same, and the total is still 99.

But I may decide to do re-do a search that I hadn’t done in a few months if I was working on that surname or place. Let’s say the total matches found increased by 10. Then I could compare the JewishGen results for each database with my spreadsheet, and update any counts that changed, and in doing so, I’ll know  which databases have new results for me to look at.

This spreadsheet now has 69 rows listing different databases and 32 columns of searches that I do. I would never be able to remember what I’ve done or what I still have to do without this spreadsheet.

How about Research Logs?

A lot of people love research logs, but I’ve never really been a fan. They are a document organized by time, rather than by task.

Writing each search I do and the results I get into a time-organized research log would allow me to find the last time I did a specific search such as Dubovy in Zhitomir, but it does not give me a good handle on where I stand on all my searches nor make it easy to see what searches I’ve done and have yet to do.

Conversely, I do like timelines and organizing certain materials by date, such as my picture collection or events for each person.

For keeping track of searches, I feel my spreadsheet is a much better tool.

Cataloguing the Search Results

And then I want to do the analysis of each search result, and determine which ones are relevant and give me information about my family. For that I created a set of spreadsheets, one for each type of record. e.g. Birth, Marriage, Death, Revision Lists (which are Russian censuses), etc.

Here’s part of a page from my JewishGen Marriage spreadsheet:

The tabs at the bottom are spreadsheet pages, one for each surname.

The page is divided into sections organized alphabetically by town. Line 48 is where the 26 results for Dubovy in Zhitomir start.

Columns I through X and even further, in this case up to column AJ, contain all the fields from the search results page.

I add in 3 other important columns:

• Column F tells me if that is a record that my researcher had found for me.
• Column D tells me if the person is in my MyHeritage tree and if so, I include a link to my tree so that I can instantly access him.
• Column B is a source citation made from a formula that pulls out information from the other fields.

I love that last item. The equation in cell B51 looks like this:

="JewishGen, "&H51& ", "&U51&" of "&J51&" "&I51&" and "&L51&" "&K51&" "&AE51&" in "&AD51

and the resulting citation is:

Conclusion