Vol 9 Oct 2002

2002 Meeting & Events Schedule
Sep 14, 2002 meeting - Using Search Engines
Sep 14, 2002 meeting - Stuff People Have
Online Genealogy Courses
Internet Sites and Other Goodies
Nov 9, 2002 meeting
Questions Looking for Answers

As a general rule, meetings will be held at the Kraemer Library & Community Center on the 2^nd Saturday of the month at 9:30 am in "odd" months. An email and newsletter will come out before the meeting. Things can change so check the website and watch your mail.

Nov 9, 2002 - Jan 11, 2003 -Mar 8, 2003 - May 10, 2003 - Jul 19, 2003

This "Genealogy Fair" will be held at St. John’s Lutheran Church, 104 South Broad St., Elkhorn WI. 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. There will several genealogy groups and vendors present. The "press release" makes it sound as though the lineup is only tentative. There will be demonstrations and "mini-lessons" throughout the day. I am planning on going more out of curiosity and it is a free event. Sponsors of the fair can be contacted at:

262-728-3719, pgleich@ticon.net, or kjendlie@ticon.net

Thanks to Mary Ann Van Allen for this one. I will be attending and strongly recommend it to anybody who wants to learn more about genealogy and history.

Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison time: 9am to 3:30 pm

Speakers:

Jim Hansen, Genealogy Librarian, tracing frontier genealogies.
Lori Bressler,Microfilm Librarian, "gems" of the microfilm collection.
Dee Grimrud,Archives Specialist. manuscript collection of the Society
Mary Jane Herber, U.S. Census.

Registration: DEADLINE OCT 16, 2002

Name:______________________________________ Address:____________________________________

City:_______________________

State:_______________Zip:________ Phone:_______________

cost:

Mail to: Julia Franco, Friends of WHS, 6948 Appleton Dr., Madison, WI 53719

Fri Sat Sun Nov 29,30 Dec 1 Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Other weekends in Dec: Christmas by Lamplight, A Pioneer Christmas, German Christmas

Exploring Door County’s Ethnic, Industrial and Maritime Heritage!

What is a Search Engine? Search engines use programs to search the web for stuff. Once it finds stuff, it records it in its own database. You ask a search engine a question and it searches its database for stuff that might be an answer to your question. Search engines will display a list of RESULTS that you get to wade through. Search engines are kind of like getting directory assistance from a telephone operator. However search engines don’t give you that one phone number you are looking for. It just gives you the state or the city that your answer might be in.

How do search engine companies make money? Some make it by having all those obnoxious ads. Some like Google make their money by selling their services to companies that want to manage their own website.

It always helps to have a strategy when you are using a search engine. To start with it helps to only use nouns in your question. Nouns are person, places or things. In most cases the search engine will ignore adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and prepositions anyway.

When I am doing a search, I like to go from general to specific. I don’t try to come up with a question that will find that one perfect site. I will ask a general question that gives me a lot of possible sites, then try to narrow it down to a more reasonable number.

For example, if I am looking for information about people emigrating from Germany to Wisconsin in the 1800’s, I will not try to hit the bullseye with my first shot by searching for GERMANS EMIGRANTS WISCONSIN 1800’s. My first question will be GERMAN EMIGRANTS. This will give you over 30,000 possible sites to look at. Even if you are Superman, it will take you forever to look at them all. To cut the number of sites to look at to a more reasonable amount, I will add additional search terms to my question one at a time.

Before I add a new search term, I will review the results. You can tell a lot by looking at the results. If you only get a few results, you might need to change the words in your question. Changing one word or even the order of the words can turn an unsuccessful search into a successful search. Another reason I like to review the results is that I can get ideas for different words to try in my question.

Another strategy is to be persistent. The stuff you are looking for is not likely to be where you thought it would be. You have to be willing to look around corners and behind the furniture. I read a survey that stated that only 1 in 20 people look past the first page of results. Over 50% of searches were questions of only one word. According to the survey, only 12% of the questions that are submitted to a search engine contained 3 words or more. You have to be willing to put a little more effort into your searches if you want to be successful.

There are several shortcut keys in windows that I like to use when I search.

If you are using Internet Explorer, hitting the F11 key will remove a lot of the clutter from the computer screen, making it easier to read the results. Hitting the F11 key will toggle you back and forth between the two different types of formats.

Right clicking with your mouse can let you do all sorts of good things; bookmarking a site so you can find it again or saving pictures.

Since webpages can be long and confusing. Using CTRL F to search for specific words can make your searches more efficient.

When I select items from a result list, I will SHIFT LEFT CLICK on the listing to open the site in a new window. This is like laying down bread crumbs so you can find your way back to the result list when you are done looking at a site. You just close the new window and you are back to the result listings. Otherwise you can easily get yourself lost looking at the results.

Words are what you use to ask your questions. If you don’t know the right words to use, you probably won’t get an answer to your question. Here are some examples of problems you can have with words.

Some words have more than one meaning. Some examples are FAST, HYSTERICAL and ROOT. Trees have roots, you can root for your home team, you can root around for an answer or you can look for the root cause.

Somethings are known by more than one name. An example is Jupiter, Zeus, Oden.

Things have different names in different countries. If you are looking for Bavaria you might need to look under Bayern. Cologne, Germany is spelled Koln by Germans.

A thesaurus is great when you trying to find different words to use. It isn't cheating to write down a list of words to try before you start your search. A neat trick is to use the thesaurus built into your computer's word processing program. If you have Microsoft Word, you highlight the word using your mouse (or the cursor and shift keys) then hit SHIFT F7 to get a list of similar words to use.

For example if you are looking for diaries of people from the civil war, and the word diary is not working you can try: journal daily journal daily log chronicle record memoirs

When you are looking for ship you might try boat, vessel or steamship. If you can't find anything under immigrant, look under emigrant.

Search engines deal with words not definitions of words.

In most case you can just type words into a Search Engine. Some times you have to add formatting to the words to get a good answer. Each Search Engine has its own rules for formatting. Most of these rules are the same, but not always.

Some Search engines default to an OR search. If it finds any of the words in your question in a website, it will return the site as a possible result. Some Search engines default to an AND search. A site will only be returned if it includes all the words in your search.

By putting a plus sign in front of a word, you are telling the Search Engine that the word has to be in the site. By putting a minus sign in front of a word, you are telling the Search Engine that the word can't be in the site. For example, if you are looking for Jaguar the animal you might have to enter a -car to eliminate Jaguar the automobile.

For some search engines you actually use the words AND OR NOT.

Sometimes you put quotation marks around a phrase. For example if you are looking for PLAIN WISCONSIN the village, if you don't put quotation marks around both words, you will get a lot of sites about flat lands in Wisconsin.

Some sites let you use wild cards like an asterisk or a question mark. You use wild cards when you are not sure how to spell the word or what to try a variety of different spellings.

Some Search engines let you search for websites that have the selected words next to one another using the NEAR command. I have rarely used the NEAR. But it is a nice tool to have in your toolbox when you are having trouble stating a question that returns good results.

These additional formatting symbols can be very confusing. Later, we will discuss doing ADVANCED SEARCHES on search engines

It helps to know how search engines work. A simple description is that search engines is that have programs that search through millions of websites to find stuff. This search is sometimes referred to as a crawl.

Some search engines crawl daily, weekly or monthly. If a search engine only crawls monthly, you have to wait a month for new sites to be added.

Some search engines only look at the words in the site's webpages. Other search engines will look at the words that are "hidden" in certain file types. We'll be looking at this latter.

Search engines do not look at all the words on the site's webpages. Some will only look at the first 50,000 to 100,000 words. This means that a website could have an answer your are looking for, but the search engine won't show this site as a result.

After you ask a your question, a search engine can return thousands of possible sites to look at. Most search engines try to show the "good" ones first. Search engines use a variety of ranking methods to determine which sites are the "good" ones.

This ranking can be based on the number of times that the words in your question show up in the site. Rankings can also be based on how popular a site is. Popularity is measured in a number of different ways.

There are lots of different search engines. I am going to spend time telling you about GOOGLE. GOOGLE is the most popular search engine and it is always my first choice. Its only when GOOGLE doesn't give me good results that I will try other search engines.

Lets talk briefly about meta-search engine sites. At these sites you enter a search question. The meta-search engine then checks a bunch of search engines. I personally don't use meta-search engines because they typically don't return a lot of results. For me, if it is not on GOOGLE, it probably can not be found. GOOGLE has indexed over 2.5 billion webpages.

The thing that I like about GOOGLE is that is has a very clean interface. It doesn't have a bunch of cute graphics or a bunch of banner ads to gunk up its looks.

If you want to be a good craftsman you have to know your tools. I strongly recommend that you "play" around with this page clicking on the buttons and the underlined things to see what happens. There is a lot of good information on this site if you look for it.

You have to keep your eyes open and read the screen because GOOGLE and other sites will add new stuff. GOOGLE just added a new feature that allows you to search for news. I'll leave it up to you to go exploring in this new area. For me, it is getting close to the point that I can eliminate the newspaper and get my news and comics from the Internet.

Lets work through some actual searches using GOOGLE. We will start with a search for the home of my ancestors Waldmuenchen a town in Bavaria. It is tricky to enter this town name into a search engine because it contains a u with the two dots over it. I am using this as an example of how you have to be persistent when you are searching for answers.

In my first try I just entered a u. This gave me 115 items. This is not a lot of webpages to get for a result.

I tried again using ue which is a common substitute for a u with the two dots. This time I got 1360 items.

This next example shows that sometimes you might have to try search terms that shouldn't work. I tried an asterisk wildcard this time. This shouldn't have worked because GOOGLE doesn't work with wild cards. However, GOOGLE found 27 items. This search showed a document describing the catholic churches in the diocese of Regensburg, Germany. I would have never found this document if I had played by the rules. Sometimes you have to be creative.

Even if you don't know the language, you can make out some words. When GOOGLE gives you a site in a foreign language it also gives you a TRANSLATE THIS PAGE link. This is GOOGLE's attempt at translating this page. Words in graphics and frames don't translate. Once you ask GOOGLE to translate a page, items that you click on in the translated page will also be translated.

The translation isn't 100% perfect. However, it is good enough for you to get the basic idea. Waldmuchen becomes "Forest resident of Munich". Directions to Waldmuenchen becomes "City forest Munich - in such a way to find us"

Most people ignore the ADVANCED SEARCH form that most search engines have. The great thing about these forms is that they can eliminate the need for all the complicated formatting described earlier (plus signs, minus signs, quotation marks, etc). The form is like training wheels for complex queries.

One of the drop-down lists on GOOGLE's ADVANCED SEARCH form lets you look for things in certain formats. PDF is a standard and very popular format for sharing documents. You use the free ADOBE ACROBAT reader to use these files.DOC are files created by word processing files. XLS are files created by a spreadsheet program.

PPT are files that are used for displays, reports and with speeches or presentations. GOOGLE is the only search engine that searches all of these different formats.

Another drop-down list lets you restrict your search to websites that have been updated recently. Because there are always pages being added to the Internet, you will want to run your search again in the future. You don't want to have to trudge through 100's of sites that haven't changed since you last looked at them.This feature lets you focus on only the sites, which have something new.

GOOGLE also lets you set preferences for how you want GOOGLE to work.

If you don't read English, you can set the INTERFACE LANGUAGE to one that you do.

Apparently somebody at GOOGLE has too much time on their hands.One of the languages is ELMER FUDD.

Here's another example of the sense of humor they have at Google. If you put in the search term "go to hell" using quotation marks, it returns Microsoft Corporation as the number one site. AOL comes in third. (This has been changed.)

GOOGLE also lets you set the SEARCH LANGUAGE. GOOGLE will only look for the websites in the languages that you select. Or so it says. When I was doing searches on my ancestral home, I had English AND German checked. When I un-checked English, I got over 14,000 results as compared to the 1360 results that I got with both items checked. Another example that you have to try things that shouldn't work.

If you page down on the preference page you have the option to set the number of results to be displayed on one page. The default is 10 items.You can set this to 100. This means that you don't have to flip through as many pages. It also makes it easy to print out the results. It can be easier to read a printed list of results instead of having to read them on a computer screen.

Using GOOGLE's language tools, you can translate webpages in foreign languages or

you can translate phrases that you cut and paste into the box.You can also restrict your search from websites from selected countries.

GOOGLE Help Central is a spot you have to visit. There is all kinds of good stuff here.

It has a great Search Help area that can make your searches easier and more successful.

GOOGLE ANSWERS is a new service where you can pay to have somebody research something for you. I spent $10 to have somebody research the origin of the onion-domed churches in southern Germany. The researcher responded in a day with some good stuff I hadn't found in my searches.

GOOGLE CATALOGS is a great place to spend money. There are thousands of catalogs. You tell them what you are looking for: BOSE radio, leather chairs and GOOGLE gives all the catalogs with the products. GOOGLE brings up the catalog page and can order the product right there in many cases.

GOOBLE lets you look at cached pages. Sometimes webpages are discontinued or go away. GOOGLE has kept a copy of the pages it has found.

GOOGLE Help Central also explains the phone lookup feature of GOOGLE.You can search by phone number, by last name or by first name. (A tip, it is better to search by first initial than to use the whole first name). You can look by city, state, area code or zip code. This can be handy if you are looking for relatives. The information is not 100% accurate. It still shows my phone that I turned off over a year ago.The price is right though, free. So I guess you can't really complain.

Sometimes you find a page that has good stuff but not enough of it. You can have GOOGLE look for websites that it feels are similar.

GOOGLE Help Central tells you how to lets you search only a specific site.Sometimes you don't want to search the full Internet. Sometimes you know the information you are looking for at a specific site. This feature lets you restrict you search. Special Searches allows you to focus your search on large sites. You can search any of the large universities. This can be helpful if you know the genealogy information you want is at UW-Madison. You can search the large sites of the US Government and Microsoft.

GOOGLE has a toolbar, which you can add to your web browser.I have this toolbar installed on my browser. Whenever I want to look something up, I enter in my search question and I am taken right to the GOOGLE results page. You have to be careful with the toolbar. GOOGLE makes a good target for hackers because it is so big. Some hackers have found how to take control of your PC through the GOOGE toolbar.

GROUPS on GOOGLE are one of the most under-used tools on the Internet.

There are tens of thousands of USENET groups on the Internet. The group acts like a big bulletin board. A USENET group is dedicated to one topic. You can post a question on this one-topic, bulletin board. Anybody in the world can post an answer to your question. USENET groups cover a variety of topics. Almost anything you can think of has a USENET group. GOOGLE has taken all of these questions and answers and put them into a searchable database. There are a number of genealogy groups and computer groups.I have found almost all the answers to my computer-related questions on the groups.

Another neat feature of GOOGLE is that it will search for images / pictures .

I tried example of searching for +Plain +Wisconsin (with + signs). There are 268,000 items in the results. There are so many items because, GOOGLE is returning websites that deal with PLAIN as in a flat piece of land.

If you click on the IMAGES tab you get a bunch of pictures. In the upper right hand corner, there was a picture of a Bindl family from Plain. This picture was on the webpage of a fishing resort in Arkansas that they visited. This proves the old saying "you can run but you can't hide." You would be shocked on how much personal information is on the Internet about you and your family.

This is also a good way to do genealogy research. You type in a last name and see what you get. You never can tell.

GOOGLE is not the only search engine in the world. There are search engines that specialize in one topic. The SURNAME NAVIGATOR lets you type in a last name.

It searches 9 different areas of the Internet for the name. It opens up nine separate windows which you work your way through.

ASK JEEVES is a site that allows you to type in a question in normal English.

Actually the other sites let you do this too. ASK JEEVES' result pages is nice and clean.

What I like, is that it also gives you suggested places to look on the right.

Altavista is another good search engines. It has a new feature that it calls PRISMA. It gives you words that you can add to your search. One of the biggest problems using a search engine is that you get stuck for words to try. This feature solves this problem.

The US Government has got lots of stuff. FIRSTGOV is the primary source for government information.

Sometimes when have a question you know where you want to search. For example, if you want the definition of a word, you know you need to look in a dictionary. REFDESK has links to a lot of sites that are like a "dictionary." The webpage for this site is very large and shows most of the items it has. You can use its site search feature if you want, but you can just print the webpage out or look at it on the screen.

YAHOO was one of if not the first site to try to index stuff on the Internet. It has a search engine feature that is provided by GOOGLE. However I find its results listing muddle and messy. Its strength is in its DIRECTORY. These are lists of grouped sites. You click on the main category and work your way down the menu. GOOGLE also has a DIRECTORY tab.

I don't use YAHOO must for searches. I use it for email, watching the market and playing double-deck pincohle.

I am always surprised what people have. In particular, there were some unbelievable photos of the old St Luke's Church (destroyed by a tornado). Somebody had an incredible 1^st Communion group photo taken in the old church.

Hank Ferstel let our group make a digital copy of the Fern Hill School records that he has. Annual school board meetings, contracts with teachers, teachers' detail records of students going back to 1867, school census, books used and classes given are all covered in these books. There are also a number of documents on a disagreement with the state of Wisconsin related to bussing children to St Luke's. (We have a summary of the documents in this collection on the website.)

This is one area that our group can work on. To start with we will need to come up with a method to determine who has what and how we can get a copy of it. Along those lines we have two volunteers who will be the "point" person in their area.

Sandy Stiemke "volunteered" to be in charge of school records. Our ancestors attended a number of small one room school houses in the area. Sandy was part of another group's efforts to gather these old school records. If you have any old school records or know of somebody who has them, let Sandy know.

Phyllis Dearborn "volunteered" to look at the township of Franklin records. There is a tremendous amount of local history and family information in these records.

If you are interested in working in an area, let us know at the meetings.

I recently took an online, how-to-do German research for beginners. It was offered by Ancestry.com for about $30. This could be a great way to take a class without having to travel to a classroom, or so I thought. Overall, I was disappointed with the class.

My main reason for taking the class was that I thought the group chats would be a great way shares notes with other researchers. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

The first reason for disappointment was that these chats were not very well organized. These chats were pretty much a free-for-all. The teacher did not "lead" the conversations related to the current class topic. Most of the questions were basic research questions about individual families. These would be okay if the answers would have dealt with "general research methods" instead of specific answers to the individual's questions.

The second reason for disappointment was the way the chats were run. You could talk to other people by typing on the screen. What you typed was shown to everybody. Anybody could answer by typing a response to you. Okay, typing back and forth is not a great way to communicate, but the "rules" of the group made the chat seem about as exciting as watching paint dry.

The rule was that if a person had a question, they type a "?". The teacher would answer questions in order. This doesn’t seem so bad. Except when the teacher would ask the person for their question, it seemed like it took forever for the person to type in their question. It then seemed like it took forever for the teacher to type in her response. In some cases, the teacher’s answer that we were waiting for was "I don’t know, I’ll will get back to you." This made the whole chat process very "painful." The person with the question should have had their question typed up and ready to go. Many of the questions asked had "standard" answers. The teacher should have had these typed up ahead of time so we didn’t have to spin our wheels waiting.

The online, class chats program used did not have a built-in capability of recording the chats. Several members of the group took notes, manually typed them up and made them available to the class. An "average" chat system would be able to do this automatically.

To be honest, after the first couple of chats, I stopped attending. The transcripts from the chats that I skipped mentioned that the number of people attending how dropped.

This was the second time that I had seen this course offered. I thought they would have had all the bugs worked out for the second offering. They didn’t. In addition to the problems already mentioned, scheduled classes were changed without much notice.

The big question is would I recommend online courses? Maybe. But I would be careful in choosing the course and who offered it.

The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Autumn 2002 had a neat article about the National Football League. In the 1920’s, Wisconsin had 4 teams in the NFL. Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and of course Green Bay. The story says that the Racine-Horlick Legion (sponsored by the American Legion) eventually became the Detroit Lions.

One of our members, Rose Ann Blau, has written a book "Remembering The Devotion of Our Ancestors." This book covers over 20 shrines and chapels, including Dickeyville, Our Lady of the Fields and St Anne’s Shrine. She brought one to our last meeting and we wouldn’t let her leave until she sold us a bunch (at a ridiculously low price.) The book has black and white pictures that are of amazing quality. I am a sucker for a good stained-glass window so I made sure I got one.

I had a few dollars burning a hole in my pocket so I ordered some stuff from the LDS church. They "give" away really neat stuff for "pennies." 1)Family History Library Catalog (April 2002) – CD version of the Internet Catalog. The Internet Catalog is good, but this CD version is quicker and actually shows you more items. 2)Family History Source Guide. The LDS church has help guides for every state and a lot of countries. This one CD disk has them all. This is easier than downloading them off the Internet Site. 3)How to use the Family History Library Catalog VHS tape. This does a nice job explaining the basics of using this extremely helpful genealogical resource. 4)

Training for Family History Leaders VHS tape. This tape is used to train local Family History Leaders. It contains a lot of the religious background of the LDS genealogical objectives.

At the last meeting I got into a discussion as to why German names were spelled in different ways. The main reason is that people didn't know how to spell the names, so they spelled names like they sound. I am talking about people in Germany not "American" people. Heck, Germany is still in the process of determining "rules" for their language. There are a number of letters that are frequently swapped: I and Y, D and T, B and P, C and K, F and V, EI and AI, J and Y, W and V. If you are looking for Pronold, you will need to look under the B's.

Lots of people have lots of questions about lots of stuff. This new section will try to help answer some of these questions. In general send me your question in written form. (Email is preferred.) The question will be added to the newsletter and eventually posted to the web site. Questions can be about anything related to the genealogy and history of Plain, WI and the general area. It is better to ask specific questions. Questions like "Tell me everything you know about the Smith family" will be sent back for additional information. Names, dates and places will give you a better shot of getting an answer. Here is our first question.

Be sure to check the website occasionally. solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/