Researching Your Family Tree Online - Moving Past Beginner Basics

After striking out at a few of the free Web sites, the author turned to the giant genealogy subscription site, Ancestry.com. Here she shelled out a lot of money and turned up almost nothing after four hours of searching because she just didn't know the site well enough to know how to find what was there. Here a search for "James Jewel" brought up too many matches to wade through. Simply narrowing down the search by including New York State (since we believe that is where he was born according to the information we found on FamilySearch), brings up someone who is most likely our James Jewel in the Social Security Death Index as well as several potential matches in the U.S. Federal Census. One of the 4 matches which are returned for the 1920 census are again our James Jewel, listed with his parents - Martin D. and Lee H. Jewel. Here the mother's name doesn't exactly match the information from FamilySearch.org, but we'll investigate this more in a minute.
More: Tips for Power Searching Ancestry.com | 10 Search Tips for Census Success