Tip Page for October/November 2003
With the holidays coming up, it's time to think about how you can turn your work in genealogy into a gift that someone in the family will appreciate. The obvious possibility is a scrapbook of photos, stories, and charts. To get you started, try going to Scrapbooking Your Family History and Heritage Scrapbooking without Pictures at about.com. Too ambitious? Try a few photos in an old or old-fashioned frame; a few stories and facts about your grandparents or great-grandparents; or a decorative family tree chart.
In the last Tip Page I included a link to Outdated Medical Terminology. This month I have a link for you to Jobs of the Past. Even if all your ancestors were farmers like mine, the list is fascinating to browse.
I've been using the Iowa Boards (queries, obituaries, documents, biographies) for some time, but this month I discovered a feature I'd never noticed before. You can search every Iowa Board in the state (in other words, in all the counties that use these Boards) in a single search. In case you haven't discovered this wonderful feature, let me give you an example.
I want to see if I can find any postings on Isaiah Newman, so I choose "select all counties" from the five options located above the Message Index and below the search engine. A new page entitled "Iowa State Wide Search" comes up. My first choice is to decide whether I want the search to be limited to "only surnames" or extended to search "the surnames and the message text." I'm going to choose the broader search, so I catch every instance of the name I want.
Next, I need to choose what Board to select: all (=all the boards), statewide obituaries, statewide biographies, or statewide queries. I choose "all" because I don't expect to find many entries for this name. Then I fill in the the "for" blank with Isaiah Newman. The next point is very important: I don't leave the setting at "any terms." I choose "all terms." If I select "any terms" I would get all the hits for "Isaiah" and all the hits for "Newman," but most of them would be for Isaiah Jones, Isaiah Smith, etc., or for John Newman, Marjorie Newman, etc. Those searches could be very useful ones for you in some circumstances, but I'm looking for Isaiah Newman specifically. For my search, therefore, I choose "all terms." At this point I try to remember to review all the choices I've made to make sure they're the right ones. Then I hit the search button. The results are displayed in the following columns: surname(s), county, type (of board), subject, poster (the person who posted the message), and date (the date it was posted). I get one result. Unfortunately, there's only one instance of Isaiah Newman in the more than 35,000 files searched: the obituary of Isaiah Newman that I myself posted.
If you repeat this search using only the surname "Newman" (you can change to "any terms, but it doesn't matter), you'll get 84 results, one of them being Isaiah's obituary that I posted. At least two of the references will prove to be to Newman, Georgia. Another, however, proves to be a lengthy and valuable obituary of William H. Easterly who married into the Newman family. It's not the information I was looking for, but it's new information on the family I'm interested in.
Experiment with using the Iowa Boards to do different kinds of work. You may be happily surprised with how efficiently they can help you locate information on your family lines.
