Learning Centre

Top 5 Things…
You May Not Know About Searching Records

1. Narrowing your search… if you don’t enter much information about your ancestor sometimes there is a deluge of the same names in the mass results and you have to scroll through pages and pages of records to find what it is you’re looking for.
   
   There is an easier way to narrow down your search results. If you look at the right hand side of the page, under the search box, you’ll see “categories of records” you can search, like birth, marriage & death, military records, pictures, census & voters lists, immigration, etc. And under that you can also “narrow by origin” like “Only Records from Canada.”
   
   In some cases you can even narrow your search by year (like Census), by birth, marriage OR death and in the military category there are options like pension, casualties, awards and decorations of honour, draft, etc. Search Now!


2. Fingers tired of typing in all of the information in the search box? There are a few different ways you can expedite the process and save typing time.
   
   •  If you go the individual “people” page – underneath the overview of information click the link that says, “Search Historical Records” and it fills all of the information in for you.
   
   •  In your family tree – if you hover over a name it gives you three choices “view profile” “edit” “search records” – hit search records and it will fill the information in for you.
   
   •  In the “people” page on the right-hand side, about half way down, there is another link for “search historical records”




3. Searching the web for a particular person? On the right-hand side of the “people page” of your ancestor, about half way down, you’ll see a “search the web for (person’s name)” Click that link and it will search Google using different options. For example: "Jack Davies" OR "Jack & Davies" OR "Davies, Jack" to bring you all results in Google. (You can type these options in manually for any Google search)


4. Famous Relatives? There’s a nifty tool on each “people” page that helps you find out if you’re related to someone famous. It’s called, “Find Famous Relatives” and it’s located about two-thirds of the way down on the right hand side




5. The Card Catalog has a keyword search to look for a specific collection. There are many types of searches you can do in the keyword box to see what collections are available. For example: you can put in “Ontario” or “Montreal” to see if there are any collections with those keywords in its title. The card catalog also has many options for narrowing the search, located under the search box. You can filter by:
   •  Collection
   •  Location
   •  Date
   •  Language
   
   After you find a collection you want to search specifically scroll down to the bottom of the searchbox page and it has information about what the collection is, what is available to search and sometimes there are easier links to specific content within it. For example: Early Ontario Settlers, 1783 – 1789 will give you the exact regions and date like, “1785 Locations: Niagara Region”