When you include the Full Text option in your search, our database will locate every page containing the words you included in your search and may return up to10,000 of those pages in your results. For example, a full-text search for the name “Young” in this collection will bring back 10,000 pages.
We suggest narrowing your search by using the Keyword searches. Each of the histories has been cataloged by a professional librarian who analyzes the contents of the history and provides appropriate terms, called keywords, for family names, locations, authors, and other important topics. The Keyword searches use the information provided by the cataloger to locate family histories, and this is the best way to quickly find the histories most likely to be of use to you.
Once you have narrowed your search by using the keywords, you can still search the entire text of the histories, one at a time, in a much more manageable fashion.
To get the best results while searching this collection, it is helpful to understand the nature of the data being searched. The Family Histories in this collection are scanned from paper or microfilm copies. The pages you view are facsimiles, or copies, of the original pages. The quality of the images depends on several factors, beginning with their original creation. Many of the histories were created using old technologies such as typewriters, carbon paper and even mimeographs.
In addition to providing access to image of the pages, we have also attempted to convert the original text into a machine-readable format to make the histories more useful by allowing you to search though text using your computer. The process of converting the text is called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. In the OCR process a computer program looks at the scanned images of the pages and tries to “read” the type, and convert it into a computer file that we can search. The quality of the OCR is directly related to the quality of the image. In most cases, the OCR that we use is quite successful in accurately reading the text, but in the case of some of the older histories, the results are not as good. Because we use OCR, there are two things you should keep in mind while doing research: 1. There is a lot of text to be searched. 2. The text is not always 100% accurate. You should always carefully examine the family histories and not depend completely on full-text search results.