What I Learned- Day Five

I learned that underneath the list of potential websites that the My Heritage search engine collected for me sits more information. There is a legend that describes what the icons mean. A red star means that this website has had information added to it in the last 30 days. A yellow star means the website has a highly popular genealogy database. A blue circle with a 1 inside it means this website used an index. I learn that an index provides more accurate results than a keyword based search can. A green circle with an S inside it means that the website supports Soundex. A yellow circle with a $ inside it means that payment is required if I want to view individual records from that particular website. Good to know.

Underneath this is another chart of information. This chart shows other My Heritage members who recently searched for the same surname that I did today. I am the first one listed, and it shows the date I did the search. The second person listed is a woman with the same surname that I searched for. I learned that she did this search on October 23, 2010 at 13:30. I can click on an icon and view her profile. Another icon allows me to contact her. This means that all the people on this list, who did a similar search to the one I just did can also see the same things about me. I think this might be useful if, as my genealogy research continues, I have reason to believe that I am related to one of them. Also good to know.

The website at the top of the list that My Heritage found for me is Ancestry.com. It says there are 68 matches waiting for me there. I can see from the icons that Ancestry.com is one of the websites that requires payment in order for me to access the information I am seeking. If I wanted to spend money, I would have just joined Ancestry.com in the first place. I rule out this website immediately.

The second website on the list is for Genealogy.com, and there are 11 matches there. I learn that clicking on the icon next to the word view will automatically open up a new window that shows the Genealogy.com website. The name I entered, my own, is already in the search engine. It says there are 5 matches in World Family Tree. Clicking that brings me to a page where Genealogy.com asks me to register with them. It doesn’t appear to cost anything, but I am still disappointed. It took so much effort to manage to register with My Heritage! The last thing I want to do is to go through all that again on another website. Ok, this was a dead end. So much for the first two results on the list!

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