Footnote Friday: Navigating the Indexes

Melody ♦ May 8, 2009 ♦ Leave Your Comment

I’ve learned something about the Footnote.com search function.  It’s not very helpful.  I either get way too many results or I don’t get what I’m targetting.

One of the ways to get around way too many results is to use the browse function.  Click on Original Documents.  Click on the database you want to search.  When the page for that database comes up, click Browse.

You are now looking the database and can search only this database.  You can go further and search only parts of this databese.

Let’s use the 1930 census as an example.  When I clicked browse, I get a listing of states.  When I click California, I get a list of counties.  When  I click Alameda, I get a list of locations.  This will include cities, townships, and so forth.  Clicking on Oakland City, brought up all the Enumeration Districts that are in this series.

I was having trouble with the search function for the 1930 census.  I already had the sheets because I had found them from another source previously.  But I wanted to link them to my relative pages.  By going through the browse process I realized something.  The sheets I need aren’t there.  I am not sure if they are under a different location.  One was from Brooklyn Township in Oakland, Alameda County, California.  But Brooklyn Township didn’t exist.  I know that the township is under Oakland City. It was more clear that the one I needed in Honolulu was not in the system since the group of enumeration districts was not listed.

It takes a little effort to find what you need, but you can do it.  I wish on the regular search screen, you were able to put in the enumeration district and then the sheet number.  Then you could by pass searching by name.  Sometimes I have the exact sheet number.  Going through browse works, but it would be easier having it on the search screen too.

Enumeration district is available, but I couldn’t get it to work since EDs have “-” in them and that is seen as a special character.  Removing it pulled up nothing.  I’ll figure it out eventually!

One other thing.  You can also do a search from the browse screen.  Once you’ve gone to the area of a database that you want to concentrate on, you can enter a search (look at the bottom of the box).  Sometimes you can go around the system especially if you already know where your people are (or where they should be).

Here are the people I’ve worked on this week:

Jose de Braga

Maria de Jesus (Jacinto) de Braga

Seraphim de Braga

Theodoro Pacheco

Olympia (Medeiros) Pacheco

Also note that I’ve been linking people to each other.  Hopefully, by the end of the month I will have all my Great Great Uncles and Aunts in the system and linked together.