Tips and pointers
A completely random collection of stuff that has hit me as I've plowed forward- giid stuff I hope but certainly sprinkled with a few rants- indulge me!:)
Don't trust Ancestry "OneWorld Tree", Rootsweb or anything from the Mormon web sites (i.e LDS, familysearch.org etc) as fact! Harsh but the truth. None of these sites or organizations check submissions for accuracy. Not even the LDS sites. And that's not to denigrate the wealth of information the Mormon's have collected and so generously share - its just that I made the mistake of thinking anything they had was accurate and learned that that was not the case. Stuff you get on sites like Ancestry.com that sites LDS sources like Millennium File etc are full of mistakes. Likewise are sites and projects like Ancestries One World Tree and Rootsweb.com World Connect. That said these sites can be great resources for getting "clues and tips" but don't believe a single thing you see there as fact. What is submitted to them is not checked by anyone for accuracy. Don't site them as a "source". Use them for clues that you then need to verify from other records. What I do, right or wrong, is if I get the info from one of these sources I will typically not site any sources. It just fills in a blank on my tree and gives me something to work on. Sometimes you'll find it is right, sometimes not.
What's better? Ancestry.com or Genealogy.com? Best guess is neither! What they don't tell you is that they are both owned buy the same company. They also own the free site rootsweb.com! What better way to control what's out there for free? Ancestry and Genealogy basically offer the same stuff with enough differences so that I guess they are trying to get you to join both. Its too bad there is basically no competition as that would, like any product or service, lead to better prices and better service. I'd love to see other businesses, in the brick and mortar world, monopolize something like they have online genealogy and not be the subject of hearings and fines etc. The other warning about these sites is the alleged number of "HITS" you get on a name when you do a free search before joining. This is way over inflated and IMHO deceitful, dishonest and an outright scam. Type in a name and chances are you'll get a ton of hits on the name. It looks like they are just foaming over with info on your ancestors. Click on any of the links to look at it and you find out you have to sign up. That's fair as there's nothing wrong with selling this info. But then you'll find that the vast majority of the "14888" records have nothing to do with the person you are looking for. And if you take the low priced "special offer" you'll continuously see there are tons of hits for "newspapers and periodicals" etc that you don't have access to with your "basic membership". So like I did you'll throw the $300 buckaroos for the year and what you will find is the search engine for these sites returns a hit for either the first OR the last name you entered and not only hits for both names together! So if you search "John Fisher" guess how many "John's" you are going to find? For census and other records you can search the whole name but it seems to be common on genealogy web sites that the search capabilities are close to useless for scanned docs that have not been transcribed. Ok, that said, I still don't see how you can not join one of these sites even though a lot of the census data and such are online now. Perhaps in the future more sites will compile all the census and other data for free but for right now the basic memberships are worth it. Just ignore all those "teasers" about what you are missing because with the over 1500 ancestors I have so far documented not ONE has shown up in the "Deluxe Membership" sections!
Post on forums! Even with Ancestry.com you can join that part for free and you will find lots of info and will get an amazing amount of help from the genealogy community! Total strangers will help you and you will probably find a distant relation too!
Newenglandancestors.org -NEHGS. If you are searching New England Ancestors and especially Massachusetts this site is indispensable. They have most of the Mass vitals online with just a couple but significant exceptions for me (Such as not having the Sandwich Mass ones- my Fish line started there- I went out and threw $175 on the books if you need a look up fyi). And if you have ancestors that came here in the 1600's their "Great Migration Newsletters" is an awesome source of great info. Sad news is it seems updates for the "Great Migration Newsletters" is now on a different site with a different membership www.greatmigration.org which is, yes you guessed it! A new membership fee! Now NEHGS is a non profit but they seem to have been bitten by the same 'sucker them in and hit 'em with new fees' bug that the Ancestry.com people use. Too bad. Still, great site with real value. Oh, its been better lately but their site seems to collapse on some nights that I'm guessing are peak use times (Sunday nights for instance).
While I'm ranting a little bit....watch out on these forums. Particularly Ancestry.com with posting anything remotely critical of them. I read that the moderators are volunteers (interesting too because I know that type of case has been to the courts and its be ruled that for profit sites cannot use volunteers as it violates labor laws!) but they apparently have orders to be ruthless with dissent and griping and have the full power to ban you from a forum and there is mostly no way to get back in. My experience was with posting a gripe asking everyone to report posts by this one company that spams the forums constantly (apparently they pay for the right to do so) and I got a very terse email from the forum moderator chastising me as if I'd threatened to feed her puppy to an alligator or something:). So....be warned.
If you are getting overwhelmed with choices and too many names and dates
that are close but you are not sure, grab a piece of paper and start writing it all down. Names, birth and death dates, marriage dates, places of residence in what years etc.
I've often found myself with what I thought were many different people and using
this technique I've been able to pretty easily figure out which records are the
same person and which are different.
For searching learn all abbreviations for a name - for instances, Thomas
could be Tom, Thom or Thos. Betsy was short for Elizabeth, etc.
Think of mis-spelling either by the original writer of the census form or
the transcriber.
This may not work for big cities but I often find things by searching an entire
town using Mass Vitals with just the family name and no given-things sometimes
fall into place or you may find a record for a sibling that contains more info
than the record for the person you are researching
I can only strongly encourage you to share your work. I do include all my sources and everything I have found on this web site. There seems to be an old school in the hobby that says "I won't share my 20 years of hard work" and I can understand that on one level. Someone that did much of their work before this was all online truly has much invested but not sharing it (unless someone has the intention to publish and sell it then by all means keep it in your pocket) to me is like writing a great book or recording a great song and then not letting anyone read or hear it! If you are just starting out I hope that, like me, you will receive so much help from complete strangers that you will be inclined give back all you received from others and more.
Maiden names - finding maiden names can be very frustrating, especially back in the pre 1900's. A good 'trick' is to look at marriage records, death records for both the woman and her husband, also the marriage records of her children (at least for Mass they almost always list the maiden name- AND snicker snicker sometimes if her name matches his name its not because they did not write her maiden name- I found with some of the husband and wife's were .......ready??? please bring up the banjo music......they were cousins and HAD the same family name to begin with! Other trick is sometimes one of the kids "middle" names will be her maiden name so you can search for that family name and see if you can find her that way or her marriage record in her maiden name. The other one I was helped with by a complete stranger from an online post is don't assume what you see is her real 'maiden' name unless it says 1st marriage. Sometimes when a women was married and was a widow she kept using her husband's family name until she re-married. Solving that one broke down a big wall for me.