Genealogy Chat

So it turns out my gt gt grandma was an actress called Kate Hudson. Obviously what with that one thats around now (daughter of Goldie Hawn) when I search for her on google I get a million pages. does anyone have links to websites that can help out with Victorian theatre

Hi Zoe, So nice to see you back on the boards. From the book the good web guide to Genealogy, there is a site www(.)entertainer-genealogy(.)org(.)uk which covers the Circus,Theatre and Music Hall Families. Hope this is some help. Sue

Below is part of an article I recently read on narrowing internet searches, especially helpful on searches where you end up with a lot of results on a search.....I found it quite useful. There's more to the article....if you're intested, I post that as well for you. The first part of the article, on searching follows: Hitting Home – Web Searches By Nancy Hendrickson If you’ve given up “real” online research in favor of quick searches, you’re missing the best part of Internet genealogy: the fun of focusing your detective skills and the Net’s limitless resources to turn a tangle of clues into a tidy solution. By researching online, I’ve wrestled some of my toughest problems to the ground. I’ve found distant cousins, regenerated dead-end branches and added hundreds of names, dates and places to the blanks in my family tree. You can, too, if you try these tricks for smarter searches. MASTER SEARCH ENGINE MATH - At some point, every Internet genealogists has used a search engine and gotten thousands of irrelevant results. That’s because search engines are like trained puppies – they fetch whatever you throw them. For instance, if you type JOHN MACKENZIE into a search engine, it will find every page containing the words JOHN and MACKENZIE, but not necessarily in that order. That means you’ll get results such as John Thompson who works at the Mackenzie Institute, or Mackenzie Brown, teammate of Gordon John. Would you rather wade through all those irrelevant pages or refine your research to bring back the best bones? Search engine math to the rescue! Most search engines use operators to help refine searches. The most common operators are quotation marks (“ “), the plus sign (+) and the minus sign (-). Here’s how each operator works: QUOTATION MARKS: Use quotation marks when you want to find an exact phrase. In the example above, if we had searched for “JOHN MACKENKIE,” (using quotation marks) the search engine would have looked for instances in which the words JOHN and MACKENZIE appeared side by side, and in that order. When I typed john mackenzie into Google at www.google(.)com, the popular search engine returned 1,260,000 hits. But when I searched for “john mackenzie” (using the quotation marks) I got only 19,600. That’s still a lot, but don’t worry – we’ll refine our search even more. PLUS SIGN: Use the plus sign (or the word AND) when you want the search engine to look for multiple words or terms. Let’s pretend that you’re trying to locate John Mackenzie’s records relevant to his life in Massachusetts. Your search would look like this: “john mackenzie” +massachusetts or “john mackenzie” AND massachusetts or “john Mackenzie” +MA. (Be sure to try more searches using variant spellings or abbreviations.) The plus sign (+) or word AND tells the search engine to return only the matches for “John Mackenzie” that also include Massachusetts, weeding out all the others. MINUS SIGN: The minus sign (-) tells a search engine to exclude a specific word. If your search for “John Mackenzie” returned hundreds of John Mackenzie’s who lived in Maine, and you want only those who lived in Massachusetts, here’s how you’d construct the search: “John Mackenzie” +Massachusetts –Maine. (Search engines are not case sensitive, so it’s not necessary to use capital letters when searching.) Two more helpful operators are OR and NEAR. Use OR when either of two words is appropriate, and you want the search engine to find all instances where either word appears. For example, you might use this operator if John Mackenzie’s nickname was Jack. By typing “john mackenzie” OR “jack mackenzie” into the search engine, you’ll find any pages that include either his given nme or his nick name. (Of course this operator might give you more search results.) Although it doesn’t work with all search engines, NEAR is another helpful operator. NEAR tells the search engine that your search terms must be in proximity to one another (usually within 10 words.) When would you use NEAR? If John Mackenzie’s middle name was Albert and you searched for “john mackenzie” the search engine wouldn’t return pages with the name John Albert Mackenzie. To make sure that the engine returns all pages with his full name, too, you could search for JOHN NEAR MACKENZIE. Check the Advance Search or Help section of your favorite search engine to learn more about the operators it uses. That way, you’ll get fewer irrelevant hits the next time you search. **Next: Refining Your Search

Hi Sylvia Just tried that link and the page cannot be found, I think it might have been changed (I did remove the brackets) Deb

Thank you everyone - gives me a little project for the weekend ;o)