| Maximizing Your Mileage from the Ellis Island Database | |
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Ellis Island Database Tactics (Continued)
- Use the Name and Gender edit option under the Passenger Search Profile. When you get any matches to
the name you requested, you will be taken to a page entitled Matching Passenger
Records and shown exact matches only. However, near the top of the page, you'll
find options to view Close Matches Only, Alternate Spellings or All Records.
Clicking All Records will give you Exact matches, Close matches and Alternate
spellings.
A bit of clarification of terms is warranted here. Close Matches would be more easily understood as "names starting with the same letters", as that's what they actually are. Alternate Spellings are variations of the surname found within the EIDB, what most of us would probably refer to as "close matches." Searching for Szmolen, for example, will bring up names such as Szmolenszky under the Close Matches category and names such as Szmalen under Alternate Spellings.
Routinely selecting the All Records option will increase your chances of success by bringing up more candidates, and many researchers have found their elusive targets hiding under variations one, two or five letters off what was considered to be the correct spelling.
You can improve your chances still further by using the Name & Gender edit option after reaching the Matching Passenger Records page. Clicking on the edit button will take you to a list of 30 alternate spellings where you can select two at a time to be included in your search. In fact, if you use the All Records approach just covered, the results will default to the top two alternate spellings from this list of 30. By momentarily detouring to this list of 30, though, you can refine your search by selecting any pair of alternatives or systematically working your way through the entire list with 15 pairs. This will ultimately surface more of the people you're seeking.
- Don't discount the three dots. Search results may occasionally
surprise you by including a variation of the surname with three dots (
) in it.
This happens most frequently in the Alternate Spellings section and is the EIDB's way of telling you that the transcriber was unable to determine a letter
or brief series of letters. By way of example, searching for Nelligan results in
some alternate spellings of
elligan. First letters in particular tended to be
somewhat elaborate and difficult to distinguish, so your ancestor may be one of
the 59,693 in the EIDB whose name starts with
In fact, it's sometimes worth deliberately prompting the database to give you such candidates. Although the results are presented with , you search for such possibilities by using a question mark. So if your Fell ancestor can't be found, you can look for candidates by entering ?ell in the surname field.
- Look forward and backward to find the digital images you're seeking. When you find a match, you'll undoubtedly want to view the original ship manifest. This is when you'll discover that some images are missing or mislinked and that many were scanned in backwards. Missing images and broken links will be discussed later, but making it a habit to use the Previous and Next options several pages each way will help with the backwards situation. When the listing for a passenger extends across two pages, it seems that the EIDB brings you into the second the one without names more often than not. The natural inclination is to click on Previous to see the first page, but this will frequently bring you to a nonlist page. In such cases, the manifest was probably loaded in backwards, so you will simply need to click Next to get to the previous page and vice versa.
Next Page > Advanced Ellis Island Search -
Morse Tools Tactics
URL:
http://genealogy.about.com/library/authors/ucsmolenyak1a.htm
© 2002 Megan
Smolenyak.
Originally published
by and provided here with the kind permission of
Family Chronicle.
