Do not forget that this website has a section They came from > Ireland that includes some of the same links (and we will be adding some of the new sites that Shauna showed us today).
Our guest speaker, Shauna Hicks, provided an excellent overview of the types of records that will assist us in locating Irish ancestors and their availability online. As is her practice, Shauna made available a pdf copy of her slides from the Resources page of her website Shauna Hicks History Enterprises. Members are encouraged to take the time to work through that information, remembering that the url listed on each slide is a live link that will collect your directly to the relevant resource.
Do not forget that this website has a section They came from > Ireland that includes some of the same links (and we will be adding some of the new sites that Shauna showed us today).
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You will mainly be searching for names which are collections of specific words in a particular order. To specify that, you use the Quoted Phrase operator e.g. "Edward Gough Whitlam" If you search without the quotes, you will find any document with any of those words anywhere in the document, singly or in combination, in any order. In almost all cases, that is not what you want. Remember that many newspaper reports will not use the full name but another version by which the person was commonly known such as "Gough Whitlam". On the other hand, there will probably be some references to formal names, so don't forget to try "Edward G Whitlam" and "E G Whitlam". In the case of males, there is no real advantage to including Mister at the beginning of a search. "Mr E G Whitlam" will return the same results as "E G Whitlam". But think about the many different ways in which women might be addressed. Always try "Mrs E G Whitlam" as well as "Margaret Whitlam", "Margaret Elaine Whitlam", "Margaret E Whitlam" and "M E Whitlam". And do not forget to look for references to a female by her maiden surname so try "M E Dovey", "Margaret E Dovey", "Margaret Elaine Dovey" and "Margaret Dovey". The proximity operator ~n added to a phrase searches for two words separated by no more than the specified n words. So "Margaret Dovey"~1 would find all of the two or three word searches listed above. By default, a Quoted Phrase search assumes a proximity operator of 1, so ~1 can be omitted. But if you really do want just the two word phrase with nothing in between, then you can use "Margaret Dovey"~0. A ~0 search can be helpful in distinguishing between two people with similar names who were commonly known by slight variants. A search for "John Brown" will give results for both John Brown and John Paul Brown. But "John Brown"~0 will give just the first. (Of course, if you want just the other, you will use "John Paul Brown".) A very useful proximity operator search can be seen in "Mr E G Whitlam"~2. It returns all references to the full name including those with up to two extra words inserted; such as Mr and Mrs E G Whitlam. You should also be mindful of the possibility that a name has been printed in a form or table with the given names and surname reversed (and sometimes with a comma added between). A search for "Gough Whitlam" will not find a document that contains Whitlam, Gough so remember to flip your search terms to "Whitlam Gough". You can ignore the comma because Trove does. If one of your family names looks like it is made up of a stem and suffix (such as Mill-er), Trove may automatically expand your search to find variants (such as Milled, or Mills). To prevent this, you can use the text operator to specify no changes, as in (Mary text:Miller)~1. Note that the text: operator was formerly called fulltext: but the shorter form is now preferred, Although your main focus will be on the names of people, searching for locations sometimes can be a very useful way of ensuring that you find the correct family. During the talk the search Linde Westwod located many references to the activities of the (Linde) family in their local community (Westwood) without needing to specify individual given names.
Paul T demonstrated the value of Peter Calver's Lost Cousins site that uses references to particular census records to match people with common ancestors. At first this seems similar to DNA matching, until you realise that Lost Cousins tells you who the common ancestor is! The following summary of steps should help you become a Lost Cousins member.
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