Twelve Tabs

When I settle in for a session of Australian research from home I open up a collection of tabs on my browser so that I can jump from one site to another with ease.

In case the above image is a bit small for you to see here are the pages I open up:

National Archives of Australia
The Ryerson Index search page
Trove
NSW BDM Family History Page
NSW BDM Birth Index Search
NSW BDM Marriage Index Search
NSW BDM Death Index Search
Familysearch
Ancestry
Findmypast
NSW State Records Indexes online
Google Australia

I am sure that many of my genimates have a similar setup.

Of course these are not the only resources I use but they are a good starting point. In the past few months I have been going through my database and checking the entries systematically (I still have a way to go). Having these tabs open is of great assistance.

I am wondering what your collection of tabs looks like.

Browsers for Work and Play

At times I have made some booboos with  social media when I post something under the wrong identity.

I have a simple solution that others may find useful.

I find that by using one browser eg Firefox, when I am wearing my Historical Society hat and a different browser, Chrome, when I am writing as GeniAus I can cut down on those errors I make.

This is not foolproof but it still avoids most slipups.

Family History Through the Alphabet – N is for …Browser

Netscape Navigator was the first browser I used consistently to surf the web in the mid nineties after using Mosaic for my early explorations in cyberspace. If I remember correctly Netscape came installed on my computer and, if one didn't get it this way one had to purchase it. 

By Browser I mean a piece of computer software that provides a conduit for people to search for, find and access information on the World Wide Web. Wikipedia  tells me "A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web". So I guess I have it right!

When Microsoft introduced the free Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996 I tried that out too. I also dabbled with Yahoo's search. As Yahoo was a directory rather than a search engine I did not use it too often preferring Internet Explorer. Then, after it was released, I was true to the Australian search engine ANZWERS for local searches until Mozilla Firefox came along in 2004. I had a long relationship with Firefox until around 18 months ago when I was seduced by Google's Chrome.

I dabbled with a few metasearch engines like Dogpile and  Mamma  in the early 2000's but these do not seem to have taken off. A metasearch engine simultaneously searches a number of search engines for you and aggregates the results in one list.

On my Android devices I have tried a few browsers and over a year ago switched from Opera to the Dolphin browser.

There are a couple of genealogy search engines around. As I don't have a very high opinion of the most popular one I am not even going to mention its name. I believe that carefully constructed searches on a general search engine will return better results than that product.

I believe that a book without an index is useless similarly if we didn't have an efficient browser to provide a gateway to the World Wide Web we would not be able to easily access all the wonderful genealogy resources in cyberspace.

Which browser do you favour?