FTM2012 - Web Search - Advantage

If you follow this blog, you might have noticed that I do a lot of Web Searching, within the Family Tree Maker program. That does NOT mean that I don't search outside of the program, but there are advantages to do this from within the program.

Here is an example of one reason to do this.

In and earlier post, I showed how to add other search websites into the Web Search Workspace. Find-A-Grave being one of them.

Clicking on that link in the Left Hand Panel of the Web Search Workspace, it will bring me to the front or home page of the Find-A-Grave website. From there, I am doing a Cemetery Search (2nd link in the Right Hand column of that website. That will bring me to the Cemetery Search page.

I am looking for a Cemetery in New Jersey. I know that name, but I want to see all of the Cemeteries in Somerset County. So, I TAB out of the name field, which will put the cursor into the Country field. There is a pull down menu there, but I would rather use the keyboard, at this point, since I tabbed out of the Name field, and hit U, until The United States appeared. Tabbing out of the Country field, I hit N a couple of times until New Jersey appeared.

Up until this point, there is no county field, but as soon as the State is selected, then the County field will appear. However, in order to get select a county, I use the SHIFT and the Tab key to do a Back Tab, to the county field, where I would type S, until Somerset County appeared (a tip for the Find-A-Grave website). The same thing happens outside of Family Tree Maker.
 

This will bring up a list of Cemeteries in a specific county.

 Again, as you can tell from the Top of the image, that this is within the Web Search Workspace.

For another example, I have information for a person in Baltimore, Maryland. I use this example, because there is Baltimore County, and the city of Baltimore. Family Tree Maker and the Place Name Authority, and the data in Find-A-Grave handle the City of Baltimore differently. In Family Tree Maker, the city of Baltimore will be listed as "an independent city" as seen in another blog posting.

In Find-A-Grave, it will show up at Baltimore City. (see below). In my example, at this point, the Birth and Death entries show Baltimore, Maryland, USA. That is because that is what my research has shown so far. At this point, I have hints that the person I am looking for might be buried in the City of Baltimore. So as I mentioned earlier, I selected Baltimore City.

My results didn't return any good hints, so I REFINED my search to Baltimore County, got a lot of hints, and added the first three characters of the Surname (last name). I didn't have to look up the name, because the basic information is in the lower Left part of the screen. Again, the earlier data did show Baltimore County.

I didn't get good results with the first characters of the Surname, so I entered the complete surname. The results may look strange here, because of this specific name. At some point in time, this person changed the name. Some records showed "Charles Ridgely Carnan" and others have Charles Carnan Ridgely. However the search results were returned but NOT as I had hoped, and the Cemetery listing is on the Right.

I can now quickly change people in the Lower Left, using the Mini-Navigation bar at the top of the Web Search Screen, or another way to change the focus person just above the name.

 Still not my person. Remembering the Surname issue, I changed from Carnan to Ridgely and got these results. At a glance, it appears that this is my person. I can see the dates that I have and dates that are on Find-A-Grave.

Switching the focus person is easy from the Web Search Workspace, so if I found other Family members in the Cemetery, I can easily compare what is on Find-A-Grave and what I have in my records.

I will have other posts, to take this information and get it into FTM2012.

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Copyright © 2012 by H R Worthington