Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Family History Through the Alphabet – Q is for … Query

When we pose a Question to a database  or a website we are said to be querying the resource or making a Query.

Sometimes the results of our Queries when querying genealogy databases or websites are not as successful as we anticipate. In order for our queries to be successful we need to familiarise ourselves with the Quirks of the resources we are interrogating.

Large databases like Familysearch, Ancestry and the NSW Historical Birth, Death and Marriage Indexes and search engines like Google will have guides on their sites that give users tips for effective searching (or building queries).There are slight differences in the way that resources deal with our Queries.

If your queries are failing try seeking out these guides and invest some time in learning how to search each resource effectively. You may be surprised at the Quality of your results..

4 comments:

Cassmob (Pauleen) said...

All good advice Jill. Queries + quirks accommodated= quality outcomes.

Judy Webster said...

So true! As for quirks... there is lots of good advice in 'Idiosyncrasies of Australian Indexes' (one of many genealogy Congress papers mentioned on my Web site under the heading 'Published papers from genealogy conferences').

Gould Genealogy said...

Spot on as always. It's ALL in the searching (ie. query) - ok most of it anyway.

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