Developing an ancestor’s story is often a fascinating journey of discovery which is made all the more interesting when we find our forebears are recorded in places that we didn’t expect them to be. After doing a search for their birth, marriage and death, and then finding them in the census records, to then drill down into some of the other record sets is always the part of the exercise that many of us, including me, find the most exciting and enlightening.
TheGenealogist’s Master Search allows us to also see a broad range of other results from a number of different records, in addition to the one that we have chosen to search for. Researchers can often discover a really fascinating result that adds to the chronicle of their ancestor’s life by looking at the other results in the panel on the left labelled ‘filter by event’. After making a search and reviewing the records returned, systematically working down through these other possible records can often reward the researcher with some great nuggets of information that we would not have thought to search for in the first place.
Setting out to do a broad trawl of the records, to see what we can find, can have its problems, however. We may also pick up those entries that don’t relate to our own ancestor but to someone who had the same name as them. Normally, this would mean dismissing the wrong records and putting them aside as we move swiftly on to find the next one that does relate to our family. But sometimes it can be interesting to just stop and read them just out of curiosity. The advantage of doing this is that we get some experience of using a different record set and seeing what information it can provide.