It's wonderful to see so many people in here on this last session of the last day. My name is Curt Witcher. I manage the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And it's just awesome to have been able to spend the week with you here in genealogical mecca, Salt Lake City.

We're going to spend some time this afternoon in this last hour to talk about how we might be more effective in using the internet. What a surprise, huh, at a technology conference. I hope you don't mind the title "Pain in the Access." I have to be careful how I say that, right? [LAUGHTER] But we know that we have a challenging time, and that challenge will increase each day, month, year, decade, because so much more information is becoming available on the web. And while that sounds trite and pedestrian, the reality means that the wonderful tools that we use to search the internet, which really is a tool in and of itself, will return larger and larger search results. And there are strategies using those search engines, which we're not even going to cover today, to help narrow your search result. But there are also strategies to take a journey on the web, if you will, without having to use Google and Bing and other search engines. Now, please don't misunderstand. I'm not advocating that we not use those search engines. I've often told people Google is a genealogist's friend, if not best friend. You can find a lot. But just think of how many times you have used Google or some other search engine to identify information. It is quite true that what you have recovered, found, discovered using a search engine probably is no more than 50 percent of what is out there under whatever surname or topic or subject or ethnic group you were looking for. To me, that's a little frightening, because we're charged with finding our family stories. And how do we do that? We do that by trying to find all the data possible. The Genealogical Proof Standard says--thing number one, the very first thing in the Proof Standard--"reasonably exhaustive search." And if we can't find the data, how are we going to do a reasonably exhaustive search? So I have a real simple strategy. I don't think many people follow it, so I'm hoping to convert a few of you--maybe all of you--this afternoon. So getting more out of the internet for our genealogy, for your genealogy. As I just mentioned, the internet is a very, very powerful tool. It's grossly underutilized, because we seem to meet and greet the internet only through search engines. We can make conscious, intentional, deliberate decisions about where to go, rather than having a search engine give us 1,507,291 search results in 17 nanoseconds. We grossly underutilize the internet. And being intentional really does pay some dividends. So our approach to the internet, consequential data is found in so many different places, and we really need to focus on finding all the data--not just all the data that's in the first screen or two of search results. Sometimes--and I challenge you--as I've said a couple of times this week, I like to give insomnia busters. I have a goal in life of putting sleeping-pill companies out of business. So if you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't get back to sleep, give yourself maybe seven to nine seconds. And then get up. Your spouse, your family, your dog, your cat, they're all sleeping. Hop online--great connectivity--and start playing around. Well, one of the things that you can play around with is do a search that would be meaningful to you and literally go through 100, 170, 200 screens of results. See what's down there at screen number 213. There's some pretty good--pardon the technical term--stuff way down there. But how many of us go down that deep? Why would we? Everything is on the first screen or two that's of any consequence, isn't it? No, not so much. Reminds me of my youngest son when he was in high school. He's now studying to be a PhD at Penn State. But the internet was new in our home, and I like to use my kids, don't tell them, as test subjects, even today when they're in their 30s. And he was doing some searching for a school paper. And I ask him, so, Aaron, how do you know you're getting the best, the most worthy stuff? And he says, as only a teenager could do, slowly turns around, gives me kind of a, man, are you the dumbest person on planet Earth kind of look. And then he says, I only use the first screen or two. Any intelligent person knows that. Well, not necessarily the most successful search result. And he is very accomplished. I know he's discovered other ways. But finding all the data, and we should focus on research data as well as surname data. I always find a way to sneak that little advice in there. So often, even when we know there are other search keys, we're led to just focus on surname. Let's just put the surname into Google, into Ancestry, into MyHeritage, into wherever. There are other very, very consequential terms, types of terms, we can use. So ask yourself, how do we use online genealogical data tools and the online data that's available to us? Do we just play the name game? I hope not. Do we just do the big sites? Is that all we really care about, is just going to the big sites? And it's not on Ancestry, MyHeritage, couple other ones, Findmypast. It doesn't exist. Oh, my goodness. And, what, Ancestry has 10 billion-ish records. FamilySearch has six to eight billion-ish. MyHeritage, another 8 billion, lots of overlap. They have it all, right? As much as they have, it's the snowflake on the top of the iceberg. There's so much more data out there. And then a final thought just to put in your head at the end of this marvelous convention is, do we use the internet as an opportunity or opportunities to vet our research? In just about any other field of discipline, when we have a hypothesis that we have supposedly gathered evidence to refute or support, most disciplines, most fields of endeavor push that forward and say, hey, this is what I believe my Englert line is from Dubois County, Jasper, Indiana, through Kentucky, Virginia, and on into Germany. This is what I believe. But in our field, we're kind of like, this is my stuff. I worked real hard, and I'm not sure I want to share it. I don't want to put it out there, because someone might criticize me and say, hey, you know that document there, there's a better one. There's four other documents that say something slightly different than what your document says. By the way, that's a secondary source, not a primary source. Don't have enough time to really get into that, but think about it. When we have put together our best effort for a family line, why not look for a place to put that where other eyes and other brains and other research experience will say, well done, did you consult these other two sources? Or, wow, there's this whole silo of data that it doesn't appear that you used this or looked at it or evaluated. So I get excited about talking about it because there are so many possibilities for us not just finding data, but finding ways to vet our data. But we could talk for another hour on that. Google, Bing, social channels don't always get this, don't always get the fact that there's so much out there that isn't in an organized, normalized data silo. There are what I call five research keys that we should use when we are facing this wonderful tool and trying to access data. Yes, surname is important, and I stuck it in the middle. But we should also search under geographic location, under place. You might be surprised if you marry place with time period, if you marry place with event, or if you marry place with one of these other, like religion or occupation, all of a sudden, new search results come up higher in the list, and you find things that you wouldn't normally expect to find--in many instances, not in all. So geographic place, ethnicity. How many times do we approach Google and even some of these large information aggregators in the genealogy space? How many times do we look for French in Michigan, Italians in Colorado, and see what kind of search results we get? We should do that. It will push results that typically would go on screen number 1,017 on a general search maybe up to screen number four or five in a more specific search. Religion--how many times do we engage our search engines in religion? And, again, married to some of the other one of these search subjects, religion and occupation. So place, ethnicity, surname, religion, occupation--use all those when you search. So that's all prefatory to what we're going to talk about this afternoon. Took me 10 minutes to do that. So what is a successful surfing strategy? Really basic, really pedestrian. But this, I believe, will pay dividends. It has for me. It has for people that I have counseled on how to find more on the internet. And you might say, as we conclude, going through this list of strategies or this list that is a strategy, well, why can't I just Google that stuff? Google's bots that create the index that you hit when you do a Google search and Bing's bots and all the other search engines' bots, they don't successfully penetrate the websites that we're going to look at. Why don't they? It's how the metadata on those sites is structured. And again, I don't want to get into the technical thing, because that's not what we're about the last session of the last day of an awesome conference. But the Google bots, the Bing bots don't index this material very well. And oh, my goodness, there's a lot of material there. So place number one that we should always go wherever our research is in the United States are public libraries. And, no, I'm not saying that because I carry a public library bias. Yes, I have worked nearly 40 years in a public library, and I think they're awesome. I think they're pillars of democracy. I think without public libraries, we wouldn't be here as a country. Park all that on the sideline. Public libraries are consequential to us as family historians, because their mission, no matter how big, how small, where they are-- a part of their mission--it can be a thimble-sized part or a big-sized part--but somewhere in their mission is to collect and preserve, publish local and family history of that area. If it's a town public library, it may be just the town, maybe the town and surrounding towns. County, just the county. State library, the state. But they collect what we're looking for. More and more public libraries are seeing the importance of a digital presence, even for their own taxpaying constituents, which is how public libraries are supported. So you can find at least an online catalog that lists all of their special collections. And be creative. As a future slide will show in just a moment, be creative when you're looking on public library websites. Look for geographically named collections. Look for things like adult collection, Louisiana collection, North Central Kentucky collection. Those normally are your local history collections.

They often serve--even though they collect published material, which is secondary source material, please don't turn askance at secondary source material. As researchers, we know we're always going after what? Primary source material. How do we get to all of the primary source material? I have a hypothesis that is fairly well-proven that we get to all of the primary source material by at least using secondary source material for tips and leads and guides and pointers to say, oh, I need to check that fact out. Oh, I didn't know that. Let's see if there's a record set that supports that. I didn't know there was a school there. Are there school records? I didn't know there was a Presbyterian church there. I wonder where the records are for that church. I wonder if my ancestor's in those records. Oftentimes secondary sources give us a roadmap for the quest to find primary sources. The second bullet point there, public libraries do serve, more than we think, as a repository for primary-source nonpublished material. They will do that if their local historical society doesn't want or can't accession a particular record type. You'd be surprised, in the vertical files and the special collections and the geographically named collections in public libraries, how many photographs, how many diaries, letters, day books from their community. If our ancestor's from there, we want access to that, don't we? Those things don't show up very high in a general search on Google. Public libraries also collect and make accessible very detailed data about the people, the businesses, the organizations, the institutions in the community. So it's kind of like our guide to what happened in that community from possibly before its founding, just before its founding, up to present time, because that's what public libraries do. I'm glad most everyone is sitting down. Because throughout this presentation, I'm going to go through some slides really quickly just to show you I'm not lying. We're not going to look at the slides in any detail. I just want to show you examples of what I talked about. So you can say, ah, that Witcher guy, I guess maybe I should try this, in the deep of the night some time when I have insomnia. So here's a regional public library in North Carolina. There are four counties--five counties, excuse me--covered by this library. Yeah, most public libraries have these home pages that look like they're aiming for about the fourth-grade level--lots of color, dancing bunnies, choo-choo trains that puff smoke. Look for family history, genealogy, special collections. And as a forthcoming slide will say, I believe this is the only place on the internet where you can look for adult services without getting in trouble. [LAUGHTER] A lot of public libraries still put these kind of collections under adult services. Why they don't think kids are involved in family history, I don't know. So looking quickly at this particular regional library, is it a lot of material? No, but it's for this regional area. They have digitization projects. What do most libraries digitize? Historical stuff--again, technical term, stuff. And what's in that stuff? Our ancestors, if they were from this area--they have the WWII scrapbooks. So here's just examples from their website. Each of their regional libraries has a genealogy list. And, yes, notice at the top, the genealogy list is all of 10 years old. But, hey, they still have a list up there, so hopefully they've grown a little bit since that 10 years. They have digitized World War II scrapbooks. I know that's a little recent for most of our research. But still, you get the idea that, in these special collections, local history collections, you get some really decent material. Always check a library's catalog. I know in our instant gratification society that we live in and how we've been, dare I use the word, spoiled by FamilySearch and Ancestry, when we type in a name, get a list, click on the name, and up pops the record. That's not how library catalogs work. They're still kind of stuck in the 20th century. Library catalogs are horrible. And I'm a librarian. I think I have license to say that. But it's the only tool to get access to the collection. So use the tool. Play with it. The best way to conquer a new website, a new search engine, a new discovery tool is just to play. Put in "Humpty Dumpty" and see what search results you get. In the public library, you're going to get a lot of children's books. But would you be surprised to know that if you put "Humpty Dumpty" into the Ancestry general search, you get 1,200 search results? [LAUGHTER]

Yeah. That just tells--play. Put in Boolean operators, and, or, and not. I want Lehigh County and Pennsylvania. What's that going to get you? Just Lehigh County and Pennsylvania. Put Lehigh or--Lehigh County or Pennsylvania, it's going to bucket scoop all of Pennsylvania, including Lehigh County. Play with Boolean operators. Play with your searches. Why do I say that? Because in public library catalogs, you'll see that oftentimes they may have microfilm of original records. And here we can see that, um--I'm going to move the mouse over. This is the note section. Tells you the years covered by these rolls of microfilm. Moving from that North Carolina library system to Waco, Texas, again, this is not a very enticing, wonderful, gee, search me kind of a website. But look down there on the first main page. They use the G word. Lot of public libraries don't like using the G word, because then people like us will come to use their collections. I'm being a little facetious, but in some areas, not too much. But you click on genealogy. You get a list of their programs. You get not really good access to their collection, but you get, then, that top part of the slide from their website, what they have, and then the major databases that they license. But every single library has a catalog. We're not going to have time to go into the catalog. Kentucky--Kenton County, Kentucky--again, on their main page, which is all about science and technology and reading and engineering. Right on their main page, they have history and genealogy. You can click on that link. Again, this doesn't look very inviting. But if you just take a few seconds to look down there, the second link there, faces and places, over 100,000 photographs from Northern Kentucky. Go down a little further. Northern Kentucky Genealogy Database. These are freely searchable. So at 2 o'clock in the morning from Walla Walla, Washington, you can be in Kenton County, Kentucky, looking at their photographs, looking at their family local history files, and that whole list of things--amazing. Still staying in Kentucky, Paducah, Kentucky--I think that's the city everyone likes to pick on as small, tiny, weeny, nothing important could be in Paducah, Kentucky. Well, it's part of McCracken County Public Library system. And under Learn, Local and Family History is the second link there, and they have a lot of digital collections for the size library they are. You can click on those digital collections and browse images and whatever things that they have scanned to date. One of my favorite examples is the Garrett Public Library. It's 30 minutes north of Fort Wayne, Indiana. You could fit 2 and 1/2 Garrett Public Libraries inside this room. But if your ancestors hailed from Garrett--or recent ancestors, because this is a fairly recent database--mid-20th century up to present day, they have not only an obituary index online, they link every obituary index entry to an actual obituary. How many other obituary databases are like that, where you have an agreement, the library has an agreement with the newspaper, to publish their obituaries online? That's just to entice you to say, wow, I have to look at public libraries. One more quick example, the Allen County Public Library, where I hail from. We have an international collection, over 1 and 1/2 million physical items in the collection. And we have 3, 4 million online resources. Almost half of those online resources are indices to records for Allen County, Indiana. Why? Because Allen County, Indiana, is our home county. That's just to show you there's so much. How can we ensure success in using public library for our genealogical purposes? Here are some bullet points. Look for their online catalog. Look for their searchable database, and look for their ask services. Many libraries have an email ask service. Click on a link. It will take you to a web form. Or open up your email and type in your question. Little small piece of advice? Don't ask. Send me everything you have on Smith.

Or don't go into 1,000 word explanatory, this is all I've done on this family, before you get to your question. Because oftentimes, those just don't get answered. The email gremlins just eat those long emails. But take advantage of it. It can really be your eyes and your fingers, if you will, in the collection. Explore their holdings. We talked about that--adult services, special collections, named collections. Look for links to other data sites. A lot of public libraries will link you to an important resource for their particular community, sometimes more than one important resource. And look for both city, county, and regional libraries, not just one or the other. Moving on quickly to strategy number two. One is use public libraries. Wherever you're doing your research, find the public libraries in that area. Use them virtually. Second, find the state library in the state where you are doing research. They are the public library for the state. They have enormous collections. They've been involved through federal funding and state funding and major digitization projects. They are the public library for the state. They do focus on published materials. They have searchable genealogy and local history files, a lot of online indices, and digital collections. I like to use Indiana as an example because we're one of the poorest funded state libraries in the country. And so I like to say that as preface to, if you have these kind of links on Indiana's state library that gets, like, no funding and has been reduced by almost 80 percent over the last 20 years in overall funding and in staffing, just think what you'll have in a real state library's website, right? I love Indiana, but my goodness, we just need to pay more attention to our state library and our state archives. So just taking a quick zoom in on collections. At the state library's website, you can click on this collections by county, and they organize their entire print collection, microfilm collection, and online resources county by county. So I put in Dubois County, one of my home counties, cemetery locator, county records, maps, et cetera. You can quickly read all of that. Bouncing over to another county, the state library has on its website a list of every single newspaper that they have. And they are the repository for the state. Many state libraries and state historical societies, if not the state library, serve as the newspaper repository. Many are working with the Library of Congress in launching a lot of these newspapers online. But most state libraries have the newspapers on microfilm, so you can interlibrary loan them from the state library to your local library. Can't say enough about newspapers as a secondary source. They help us out tremendously. Just other things, resources and services. Taking a quick look at the South Carolina State Library's website, they have an amazing collection, organization of obituaries, county by county, throughout the state. Let me just quickly say, they're not the actual obituaries, but they're linking you to the county. They tell you the newspapers that the particular local library has index for obituaries. And then if there's an online version of that index, they link to that online version--kind of one-stop shopping. It's worth the look. And this is sort of a quick glance at one of the screenshots from there. They also have an online death records and death indexes. And so there are links from the state library's website for that. So try me out. Wherever you're doing research, having a little trouble finding data sets to help you draw better and bigger conclusions, try the public library and now the state library's website. How do we ensure success? Remember their collection strengths. City and church directories of all kinds, published histories, county histories, church histories, et cetera, and newspapers. They're huge. Online catalog--most state libraries have a more robust online catalog than your normal libraries. Notice I didn't say easier to use. I just said more robust. So you're able to discover more items, and more items are cataloged into it. But the user interface, the UI, for most catalogs anywhere is really--kind of--not in line with the true discovery that you find on Amazon or other websites. Explore links to other libraries and other library-related sites. Making sense so far? Again, this isn't rocket science at all, and you're probably thinking to yourself, oh, man, I stayed around the last hour for this. But it's a great strategy. It works. It gets you data. And we're just a little less than halfway through the strategy. Point number three in the strategy, use state archive websites. State library, state archives. State archives tend to be driven to house, because it's their charter, if you will--charter small city--official governmental records. So they are housing the records of the state government in whatever state they are located. So their materials are largely unpublished, their manuscript-type materials. Most state archives have kind of oozed a little bit out of their main mission. So you'd be surprised once you look at the calendars, the catalogs, the guides to state archive what other things you might find. So the Indiana State Archives has other things related to the state founding than official governmental documents. But largely, they're archiving the documents, the papers of the government. And there are many wonderful things that we can find--online guides, calendars, research guides, digital collections. Most state archives and archives of all types realize if they want customers, they're going to have to serve those that are virtual customers, customers that aren't going to darken their door. The last bullet point there, don't bank on it, but kind of expect it. Many state archives, for all kinds of reasons, become a de facto archive for county materials when the county archives, the county courthouse, the county record centers get too full. Happens in Indiana. Happens in Ohio, Illinois, a lot of states. So look for them to be custodial repositories for these county records, not state records. And they link to all kinds of other archival sites. I like the Illinois site because they dare to, on their first splash page, have a link to databases. And they also use the G word, genealogical research. They have amazing databases. If you have Illinois ancestors, to make all of my English professors and teachers turn over in their graves, you can't not use the Illinois State Archives's website. It's just that good. You have to use it. So just a small list of their databases, more databases, their statewide marriage index. They have a collaborative arrangement with the Illinois State Genealogical Society. They're still building this marriage database from 1763 to 1900, records coming in all the time--great little database to locate folks. So not everything is on the large information aggregator's website. They have a neat servitude database, slaves that ended up in Illinois. That's just an enlargement of the screen we were looking at. They have genealogical research publications as PDF documents. You click on the subject you want, like state census records. You can read it online. You can download it. You can clip portions into your research notes. It's really quite fine. There are a number of ethnic publications, as well. They talk about how they archive things. So if you're interested in these counties, here's the university you go to. So they have a decentralized archival system. I think that comes from having two capitals in Illinois. You know that Illinois has two capitals, right? Chicago and Springfield. [LAUGHTER] Of course, on any given day, Chicago will refuse to admit that they're a capital, because they feel that they're a country. [LAUGHTER] No deference to my good friends from Chicago. I have lots of friends from Chicago, and my second son lives right outside Chicago. Just a screenshot or two from the Missouri State Archives. Again, every time a new authority--in many states, it's the Secretary of State--whenever he or she gets elected, they have to change the website to put their stamp on things. That make things a little challenging for us when we get used to something. But, hey, we're used to change, right? We see it all the time. I mean, Ancestry always stays the same, right? MyHeritage stays the same. We won't go there. Missouri State Archives, you can see on this second page their research room. They're using that term kind of tongue-in-cheek, because anything that is a link there you can click on and get access to at least an index or an abstraction of records. Doing Missouri research, great place to visit. And then a special section for their online records, as well. From the Missouri State Archives's website, you can link over to Missouri Digital Heritage. That's why I say look on these websites for links to other sources. You'll find some real winners. A lot of states that were in existence during the Civil War have huge Civil War collections. Going over to the Maryland State Archives, just another example. Notice on the left-hand side these quick links. Sometimes quick links are great, sometimes not so great. They always should be explored by you and I as family historians, as family history detectives, because they may lead us to quick access to consequential collections. But also notice on many websites, there is a navigation bar where my cursor is going across the screen right here. There's a navigation bar. Click on all of those, as well as the facets or the links that are along the side. So if we continue on, just quickly going through this site, we can browse by record, browse by user, browse by topic. We can link, then, over to Maryland State Archives's special collections, then to the archives of Maryland Online. We can't even find city directories, which really technically shouldn't be in an archive, because those are secondary sources. Archives, typically by design, by collection development policy, collect manuscripts, primary sources, original records. But here it is, lo and behold, on their website. Find all kinds of things. Here is Maryland State Archives's guide to ethnic research. Oh, my goodness. Remember we talked top of the hour about using five research keys to find things? Well, here's the Maryland Archives kind of agreeing with us that ethnicity is kind of important. So you can see Germans, Irish, Polish, Czech, Italian, Dutch--worth exploring. Moving quickly to another state archive, one of the best in the country, my opinion, is Michigan. They have a great website called "Seeking Michigan." What makes the archives great is a dynamic duo that most archives don't have. Most archives have excellent staff. Be kind to them, and they will bless you over and over and over again with guidance and counsel and access to some amazing things. But what Michigan has is also great support from a really savvy bureaucrat who runs that place, and they have foundation support. Foundation support--what, that's like their basement is strong, or something? No, it's dollars from a foundation that really works in the healthcare field, but likes what they do and how they touch people's lives. So they turn a million or so over to the state archives every year. Amazing things happen here. All these different things that you see on the screen--guides, online collections, services. They even have some indices that you would expect the state archives to have. So the Detroit Free Press Index, to their morgue files, their old photographs and pictures--that's online for free browsing from the Seeking Michigan website. It's an amazing place. A lot of great staff members have put wonderful time in there. Michigan in the Civil War. Moving quickly to Arizona, again, you have these great buttons. You just click on Online Resources. A lot of it is focused on just general-interest material. But you and I, as researchers, will look in that top left, Online Resources. We'll slide all the way over to the top right. Any state that has a memory project--what do you think, or what do you know from your experience--is in a memory project? Photographs, historic photographs, newspapers, sometimes manuscripts. It's the old, old history of the state being pushed forward. It's well worth it. Arizona maps online--we'd never be interested in that bottom right-hand side, would we? And then over on the bottom left, Arizona Historic Digital Newspapers--nah, we wouldn't care about those either, would we? So the state archives's website has things of consequence--maps of their historic railroads, if that's important in Arizona. Because Arizona railroads and mining brought a lot of immigrants to the state. And their historic photograph collection. So how do we be successful in using state archives? Use their growing number of databases. Explore from the inventories. Mine the information regarding state agencies and links to other agencies that might help you get more data. Almost, not quite, every state has a state archive. The ones that don't, it's typically the state historical society that serves instead of, in place of, the state archives. Same thing with state libraries. Not every state has a state library. The ones that don't, the state historical society serves in that capacity. Some states have a joint state library and state archive. Arizona is kind of that way. Does that make sense? Let's quickly move on before our time totally gets away from us. Public library. State library, state archive. Fourth one, state historical society. Amazing. Most states have some really amazing historical societies. They also are keepers of manuscript collections, but usually not the governmental records. So these are diaries, day books, company records, ledgers, et cetera. They do have research libraries. Most have online catalogs. And they coordinate some really interesting programs--centennial farms, pioneer homesteads, veterans' histories, county historians as a sort of program. They can be your entree into local county records, as well as governmental records. So what do you think a centennial farm project would have? Well, it would have the documentation to prove the centennial farms. Ohio has a great centennial farm program. Pioneer homesteads--oh, my goodness, who's keeping those records? Who's keeping the documentation that this homestead and that homestead and that homestead are pioneer homesteads? Well, it's the state historical society. Indiana's is called Indiana Storyteller. Their manuscript collection is so large. I mean, it's just amazing. Almost anything that just even thought about Indiana--didn't even have to be in Indiana--can be evidenced in their research collection. So it's a really, truly great thing. Going up to Kansas--trying to pick a number of different states as examples--the Kansas Historical Society. Again, along the top, you have your nav bar, your navigation bar. So you can look under any one of these tabs, explore those. And then we have, right front and center, Collections tab. That's where a lot of our focus wants to be when we first come onto a site. So I click on that. First thing that pops up is a screen called Online Collections. So you and I like that, because I don't think everyone in Salt Lake or Indiana or Pennsylvania can just get up anytime you want and go to Kansas. In fact, Dorothy and Toto--we're not in Kansas anymore, right? So you look at their website, and--they actually have--you can browse their holdings by county. So you click on the county that you're interested in, and up pops the actual digitized records for that county. And there are some amazing ones. Here are census returns for the 1859 census, county by county, presented on the historical society's website. Wow, that's kind of nice. You might be hard-pressed to find these little county censuses and town census records on your big information aggregators. So love Ancestry. As a library, we couldn't do without them in helping our customers. But you know, not everything's on Ancestry, just like not everything's on the web. So use all these things. Kentucky Historical Society, it seems like they change their website for fun as often as they can. But look for ways to get to catalog. Almost this entire hour, we've talked about the importance of catalog. Look at the catalog. Look at the catalog. It's basically your finding aid. And then look for online collections. Look for things that you can get your hands on without actually having to travel there. And there's your catalog, digital collections, artifacts catalog. And you can go down the list there. Kentucky Ancestors Online, they link over to the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives. There's Kentucky Ancestors. There's a lot of good material on there. How do we be successful in using state historical societies? This is almost sounding repetitious, isn't it? Well, we're going to look for their calendars and their guides and their online catalogs, their indices to manuscripts. We're going to use state government documents, image databases, and links to get us to other things. And they help us explore the history of the state. I'm going to take a quick pause here to insert one of my favorite phrases, in case some of you haven't heard this before in this conference. "Doing the history eliminates the mystery." When we have a dead end, there are a number of reasons why that might be. Almost always amongst those reasons why we've hit a brick wall, why we've hit a dead end, is we don't know enough about the context of the ancestor that we're searching for. So we don't know why they're here, wherever "here" is. Or we don't know why we suspect they're there. We've looked at all the records. Well, usually when we say we've looked at all the records, we really mean, we've looked at all the records that are easily available to us. And the ones that are not so easily available are likely the ones that have our answers. Can't tell you how important it is, if you're in a county, to know something about the county--when it was founded, who founded it. In one of my earlier presentations, we ought to ask a lot of why questions as we discover things and we're trying to link a potential ancestor to our tree as a real ancestor. So we find someone in an area. Why are they there? People just didn't land places for the heck of it. Oh, let's just stop the wagon and put down roots here. Clear the land, build the cabin, plant the crops. Usually a reason. So historical societies at the state level, they're a treasure trove of context and data for us. So moving onto step number five in our strategy, looking at state geological society's websites. So we played a lot in the state arena. They're great for research guides, online helps. Yes, I am being really parochial here, because I believe that the Indiana State Genealogical Society has one of the most robust websites. And they offer a lot of things for free, which is antithetical to a great business model. But the Geological Society has benefited from some really frugal, wise management. And we give away $20,000 a year, and we still, through donations and gifts and memberships, have over $100,000 in the bank. And we have no bricks and mortar structure. So we're just always looking for ways to spend more money--not foolishly, but to forward face things. A lot of genealogical societies are like that--maybe not in as good a position as the Indiana Geological Society. Our website is a very functional website. You have that top collection of buttons there. If you click on Databases, we have 2,101 databases. It grows every month. We have a free monthly newsletter. Next slide shows that. I left the little bar at the bottom. A free monthly newsletter that is seven pages or more long every month. Sign up for it if you have Indiana ancestors. You don't have to join the site. You don't have to pay anything. We don't sell your email lists to anyone. It's just a great way of knowing what the heck's going on in Indiana, and we're constantly forward facing more information. Ohio's another great genealogical site. Pennsylvania. There are great genealogical sites across this country. Florida State Genealogical Site, they have a pioneer index. We'll take a look at that slide in just a moment. So Indiana, just continuing on free databases, as well as behind the membership wall. There's our good friends to the east of us here, in the east of Indiana, Ohio Genealogical Society. Look at all the information--free OGS databases, that whole page. Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, their catalog is online--member collections, publications. There's our good friends in Florida, where Drew Smith and others are from. Here's the actual pioneer index. Over on the side, where you see the eyeball under Actions, I want to look at that. Click on it. Up pops the detail from that particular certificate, and there's an example right there, along with some biographical information about whatever person you're looking at. So how are we successful using state genealogical societies? They typically identify the most useful publications for the state, print and online. Identify projects and learning opportunities. They're great collaborators, evaluators. Quickly moving on to strategy number six, and this is the last one. So it's a six-step strategy. Public library, state library, state archives, state historical society, state genealogical society. Sounds like a broken record, doesn't it? Makes it easy to remember, right? The sixth one is the USGenWeb project. Now, before some of you who may have had a negative experience with USGenWeb get your hackles up in the last moments of this conference, yes, I'm very well aware of all the warts and wrinkles on USGenWeb. Nothing is perfect. If we wait for perfection, we will die unhappy and very lonely. Don't let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of progress. There are some amazing USGen websites. And the county that you find yourself researching tomorrow as you've made a leap back or made a leap sideways to a collateral line--that particular county may have an amazing USGen website. So go look. There are some great ones in Tennessee, in Kentucky and Indiana that I've used a lot. We probably all in this room know that they're arranged by state and county. They have growing numbers of indexes and research aids and transcriptions and digital data. So going back to our friends in Texas, the TexasGenWeb is pretty amazing. Yeah, there are a few counties that may benefit from a little more attention, shall we say. But there are some amazing counties. So I just picked Brazos County. Have a nice little history of the county. Then notice on the left-hand side all of these links that you can click on. There are databases and resources, repositories. And just quickly going through the Government and Civil section, notice wherever it says "WEB," that particular resource has been posted on the web for free. If it's not available for free, it will tell you that. Just more vital records available. Some are still in book form. Some are online. Brazos County Marriages. I mean, it's pretty amazing. Among the best Gen websites in the country, I believe, is one Indiana one from Orange County. Go ahead. Challenge me. Someone did at the end of the day yesterday and gave me a Tennessee county. And I looked at and I thought, yeah, pretty good. Still think Orange County is better, but they're both awesome. And what does Curt mean when he says better? More indices, more transcriptions, and more actual copies of documents. That's sort of the trifecta. We'd like them all to be images of documents, the whole thing. But I'm not sure I'm going to live long enough to see that happen. But if we have an index or an abstraction, we at least have a start. And then if we could actually see the document--the probate, the Bible, whatever it is. Orange County is on a mad mission to digitize and post everything. They even have two places on their site where you and I, if we had Orange County ancestors, can upload information. They're interested in making all of Orange County, everything, freely available. And it's kind of like the Cyndi's List, if you will, of Orange County. So you have this nice alphabetical listing--Bible records, biographies, cemeteries, land records. They actually downloaded from the federal government General Land Office site the original land patents for Orange County. It's like, ah, nuts with going to that federal site that's up and down, depending on the whim of some lawyer or some judge somewhere. We'll just download the whole thing for Orange County and stick it on our site. We have a lot of family records, family papers there. And you can look at the links--group sheet, probate packet, estate settlement, contents of an estate box. They have a growing number of photographs, school photographs. Of course, those of you who know anything about Indiana, basketball. March Madness starts, what, Sunday? And then you have these wonderful photographs of really happy people. [LAUGHTER]

They're not smiling, because they don't want the photographer to steal their soul. That's the lore I've heard. So how do we have success using USGen websites? Well, we have success using them by using them. Links to significant county data. Data provided for those who should know and have access to the resources. I've told people that it allows us to research in the area before we actually go to the area, if that's part of our research trip plans. And then increasingly, indices are linked to growing digital collections. So does this six-part strategy make sense? You might say, as I kind of teased us at the top of the hour, Curt, that's great. You've just wasted 15 minutes of my life, because I can just google for all of this stuff. Well, the fact of the matter is, you likely won't find maybe even 10 percent googling for the actual documents. Won't find even 10 percent. But if you use Google to find the state archive or the state library or the state historical society and then you explore their collections, you'll find a lot more. Why is that? Again, we referenced it at the top of the hour. It's because the metadata that record repositories create isn't the type that the bots that Google sends out to scrub sites--they don't digest, they don't penetrate websites very well that are done by state libraries, state archives. Some of you have heard of SEO, search engine optimization. These history organizations, they give no attention and no resources to search engine optimization. People who are making money for a living and want lots of traffic, they're going to do some SEO routines to make sure that Google bots can get in there. These record repositories, they just don't have the interest, the expertise, and the investment to do that kind of thing. So try it. Try it for size, even if it is an insomnia buster. Since we have just a few minutes, I want to do what I call strategy plus. We're going to go through this really quick. NUCMC, National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections--again, it is an insomnia buster. It's the most plain-jane, horrible-looking website, but you have access for free to some of the best cataloging in the world that's done on manuscript collections and major repositories. Look for your surname, but look for the ethnic group. Look for the geographic area. See if there are some things in repositories where you would never guess them to be. GPO Access stands for Government Printing Office. The federal government has churned out more paper than any other publisher in the world. Your tax dollars hard at work. Might as well use it. Google GPO Access. It's a frighteningly horrible search interface. Play with it. Look for the war you're interested in. Government Printing Office means it's going to be focused on government stuff. Look for the war. Look for banking. Look for settlement. Look for railroad, things you know the government was involved in. There's an amazing amount of detailed information. Just as a sort of teaser appetizer, the most robust history of the Marines in the Mexican-American War was published by the Department of Defense in 1994. It lists everybody--where they were from, what they did. It's a book, like, this thick, and there weren't that many Marines in the Mexican-American War. So they're just chum full of data. Federal government has published Naval documents in the American Revolution. They're up to volume 17, I believe, and each volume is over 1,000 pages. What kind of Navy could we have had in the American Revolution? Not this huge, big nuclear fleet that we have now. But they go into so much detail--the advertisements to lure people to sea, to be on a ship and risk their life 90 percent of the time. So GPO Access is another great one. Library of Congress, they're changing all the time, but they have tens of millions of images of photographs, newspapers, manuscripts. Go there--another great insomnia buster. Linkpendium. How many people have used Linkpendium? I'm glad to see more and more. It's a huge website like Cyndi's List, only maybe 10 times larger. They have 10 million organized links at Linkpendium, by surname. That's the majority of them. There's about 1 million location links, not just surname links. And then WeRelate.org. And I'm going to end on this slide, and then we'll have maybe about five minutes for questions. FamilySearch--to use my favorite poor English statement, you can't not go to FamilySearch. They're digitizing film. Their wiki is amazing--over 80,000 juried articles. And if you have, like--let's say--it hasn't happened yet, but I'm researching a family line, and all of a sudden I'm in Indiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia. How did this collateral line get down to Georgia? I know nothing about Georgia repositories. How do I research in Georgia? What kind of records are available? FamilySearch Wiki. Go to Georgia. Oh, my goodness. All the online records for Georgia are there. Links to other Georgia places are there. It's like your research guide to Georgia. So the FamilySearch Wiki. FamilySearch is a leader in this space. They collaborate with all the other major information aggregators. So research strategies to get more out of the web than just doing Google or Bing searches. So we have about four minutes for questions. If there are any questions, there's a microphone sort of in the center, back of the room. If you'd go to the microphone, I think everyone would appreciate being able to hear your questions. If you're ready to call it a day, call it a conference, that's OK, too. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]