Lyceum Course - Internet Genealogy - Can't Find
- Some Reasons A Record Can't Be Found on the Internet
- Does not Exist
- Anywhere on the Internet -
And Might Never - Eg. Historical County Court Records (But some have been abstracted and might be)
And You'll Never Know It Isn't There (Yet) - Good Practice Hint #11
- But an Index to the Record Might Exist
- Does not Exist in a Single Record
- Site/s Where Record Exists Hasn't Been Searched
- Searcher Doesn't Know About It
- Searcher Can't Find It
- Search Unsuccessful
- Don't Have a Good Search Strategy
- Don't Fully Understand/Use Form - Eg. Not in English / Poor Instructions
- You Lack Enough/Correct Information to Form Correct Key
- Search Algorithm at Site Incorrectly Implemented - Eg. (A or B or C) must be written (A or (B or C))
- Key (Information on Search Form) is Too Specific - Ie. Not all Records are Complete
- Key is Too General
- Have Too Many Candidates to Search Through Manually
- Clue is Too General
- Haven't Used the Correct Key/s at a Site/s Where Record Exists
- Search Key Doesn't Match Record Key
- KEY - Key Entry - Eg. Incorrect Typing
- RECORD Indexed Differently - Eg. Under Reed but you searched using Reid
- Sites in Foreign Language may need Diacritical Marks
- Record is Different than You Expect
- Records are Poorly Indexed - Eg. Poor quality OCR
Eg. "History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania" p.486.Doesn't follow columns correctly because of image. Name under image garbled.
- Census Enumerator Heard Differently
- Record Indexer Misread Record
- Your Starting Information is Incorrect - Eg. Looking in wrong County/State
- You were given wrong information by another researcher
- You misunderstood information you used as a key - Eg. Ia in
the 1850 census usually stands for Indiana not Iowa.
© Prepared by Jay January 30, 2012