Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Tuesday's Tip - Ancestry.com has alot, but not everything!

Today, right before dinner, I was searching around for more info on my ancestor Marmaduke Lloyd.  He is my 4th great grandfather.  As he was born in Ireland around 1810, I thought he would be a tough one to get further back on.  I have a very hard time with Irish research. Typically, once I get a line back to Ireland, things fizzle out quickly.  I was mainly hoping I might be able to narrow down Ireland to a county.  

A quick search on Family Search gave me two census documents I already had.  

Ancestry.com has 11 suggested "connections" for Marmaduke, and all are for "my" Marmaduke.  None of them have his parents.  

A quick Google search however brought me this website as the first hit.  Following it I have found the parents of Marmaduke Lloyd, as well as several siblings and a genealogist cousin!

Interestingly, this site has Marmaduke Lloyd but not my 3rd great grandfather John T Lloyd!  

Once I entered in the data from the site to look for collaborating sources at Ancestry.com, I was able to find more documents and will be working on this family for awhile!

Of course, not everything can be found on the internet, but one should also be careful when doing online research to not rely on just one website, no matter how great, for all your research.  Ancestry.com is great, really, really great.  FamilySearch.org is great, really, really, great.  I'm sure anyone who remembers having to read microfilmed, un-indexed census documents during library hours would agree that using these great sites is amazing.  

Sometimes another search engine can give different results, such as Bing or Mocavo (special genealogy search engine)

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