Didn't Find It in the Index?

This article was supposed to be in the 2009 March/April issue of Everton's Genealogical Helper. It was then supposed to be in the Spring 2009 issue that never happened. 

I figured that it should finally be published somewhere, so here it is.

If you didn't find it in the index it only means that you didn't find it in the index. Looks at examples from Census, Court, printed, and various online indexes, especially the online Newspaper sites. 

A lot has changed in the 15 years since then so updates to it will be noted.

A lecture that expanded on it was created in 2010. 

Didn't Find It in the Index?

By Jeffrey A. Bockman

One of the first lessons that I learned when I started to do genealogical research was "If you didn't find it in the index, it only means that you didn't find it in the index!" It is a saying that I keep reinforcing in my census lectures and several others as well as in a few of my prior articles.

My first introduction was from not finding my maternal grandfather in the 1920 soundex index. John Stevenson along with his wife and their young daughter, my aunt, were listed in the census but unfortunately they did not have a last name. On the soundex card it looked like their last name was Johnston, dittos of the head of the household's last name, his father-in-law. On the actual census record their last names were blank. Maybe the census taker had planned to come back and fill in the last name at a later date.

Another example was in a New York State county courthouse where I was getting very frustrated searching through the indexes of court and probate record books, along with the help of the county clerk looking for a probate case. While pulling out and searching the books for the second or third time, I heard my wife say, "What if it isn't in the index?" Sure enough the case was recorded on the proper date; it just had not been recorded in the index. The clerk then wrote in the 1859 entry in the index, over one hundred and forty years later.

It was further reinforced in a Triplett family book that had been revised to include two or three additional generations. My parents were listed in the updated section with a last name of Beckman rather than Bockman. I checked the index and neither name was included. It turned out that the index had not been updated to include any of the names of the people in the added generations.

The indexes for some genealogy books can be deceiving, especially when the title appears to be all encompassing but the contents are not. It is fairly obvious that a book titled Marriages of Virginia, that is only one to two inches thick, probably does not contain everyone that was married in Virginia. After not finding a desired record in the alphabetical contents or the index of one of these compiled listings, one should see if there is a list of what records and time periods were included. See if it included the correct county, time period, church, cemetery, or whatever else they are documenting.

Online Information

As the NetFamilyHistory articles over the past several years have been showing, the amount of digitized and transcribed information that is now available on the web is almost unbelievable and still growing. Unfortunately many of these online sources have the same problems and issues that were mentioned above, but many people expect that everything a computer does is correct. Technically it is. A computer does what it is programmed to do with the information that was entered. Is the programming always correct? Is your input always correct? Is the data always correct? Not always is probably a pretty fair and correct answer.

Computer Indexes

Many databases and subscription sites allow easy access to the information by searching for a person's name. There are times when this is not necessarily the best method especially for common names of if the name was changed or incorrectly entered or indexed.

The date of September 1st on a passenger list that was written in a fancy handwriting was indexed as the 14th. In this case it would be nice to be able to see the previous or next sequential record to be able to verify the date.

Searches using wildcards for a single character or for several characters can be helpful. However, every index is not always correct or always complete. Ancestry.com and some other sites require at least three characters before a wildcard can be used. If any of the first three characters in the index are incorrect then the name cannot be found, even with wildcards.

A 1930 Census search in Ancestry for a 10 plus or minus 1 year old Jane Stevenson born in Illinois returned no results. Removing the born in Illinois criteria resulted in a list of people including one born in Illinois. It turns out that the data for the place of birth was only entered in the index for the head of household, not for everyone.

A search of any of the 1920 online censuses for the John Stevenson's family will return no results because their last name was not listed in the census.

The Illinois State Marriage Index up to 1905, http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/archives/marriage.html, can be searched for all of my grandmother's ancestors in Bureau County, Illinois without finding any results. Looking at the list of counties and the date ranges that were included shows that Bureau County only has entries from 1837 to 1854. There are several other counties that also have limited or no entries. Some of the county clerks would not release the information for the voluntary indexing project.

Indexing

Paid contractors or volunteers are indexing many of the databases. The record images and the handwriting are often difficult to read. Occasionally the people doing the indexing may not be that familiar with the local names, terms, or handwriting.

Computers using optical character recognition are also creating indexes for some printed sources. They can often misinterpret letters especially if there is a fancy or enlarged font or a distorted character. Typesetters occasionally used alternative pieces of type if they ran out of the correct letter. Individuals will read it as desired but the computer will identify the actual character or treat it as unknown if a piece of type was used upside down to look like another letter.

One area where computers are of great assistance is with the published county histories, biographical sketches, and family books that were either poorly indexed or had no index at all. Some sites claim that every word in their publications are indexed, however, I have had occasions where I was unable to relocate a source after performing a search using the names or terms found on a prior printout.

Historical Newspapers

Historical newspapers are one of my favorite sources because they can give you details about your ancestors and where they live that are not available anywhere else. I love reading old newspapers and I am constantly amazed at what can be found in them. The major problem was that you first needed to know where and when an event occurred to even think of looking at a newspaper.

Today, online historical newspapers can help you to find articles about people in places where you would never have considered looking for them. An interview of Theodore Bockman upon his 1894 arrival in Mobile, Alabama was found on the Historic New York Times website along with several other entries at GenealogyBank.com, and one at NewspaperArchives.com. Newspapers across the county often carried stories from other newspapers that were of world or local interest.

Then there is the opposite situation, where one knows the date and place of an event, finds that the appropriate newspaper is online and that it is indexed, but cannot find anything in a name or keyword search. Reviewing the newspapers on or around the date of the event will often turn up an article. Even if the newspaper is online and indexed, remember that every word in every story is not always indexed!

Read the Paper

It is a good idea to review an entire weekday paper and possibly portions of a Sunday paper to see what was normally included in the paper. This is not as hard as it seems because older papers were often only between four and twelve pages long, sometimes up to twenty in a large city. While many of the features are similar, each newspaper often has a unique focus or areas of interest. In the 1890s, the New Orleans Times Picayune contained considerable information about marine activities including people and cargo on both the sea and the Mississippi River. Visitors and regional business were also heavily covered. The 1892 Boston Times contains more about local people and activities, such as yacht and bicycle races, than information on visitors to the city.

While spending several days reviewing microfilms of the 1890 New Orleans Times Picayune looking for information around the time of Theodore Bockman's marriage to Alva Neuhaus in New Orleans I was able to see what the paper normally included. The paper listed the normal courthouse records that included their marriage license being issued and their wedding. The paper also included a daily Marine News column that showed which ships had arrived, were cleared, and had sailed. A day or so after some of the arrivals there were articles about the ships voyage telling about the weather, passengers, and cargo.

While I was reviewing the social pages to see if there might be an article about the wedding, I noticed that it listed the names of the people who had checked into the major downtown hotels on the prior day. I started reviewing the papers going backward from the marriage certificate date and found the dates and the names of the hotels that Theodore and Alva had checked into. I ran out of time so I was unable to get a listing of the ships that had arrived the day before Alva had checked in. I wanted to see which ships might have brought her. I also wanted to look for the names of the people who had checked into the same hotels between then and the wedding date to see if any family or friends came to the wedding.

Since it would be a while before I could see the microfilms again, I sent Tom Kemp at GenealogyBank an email asking him to add the New Orleans Times Picayune (starting with April & May of 1890) and the Bluefields, Nicaragua newspapers to the collection. It would be nice to be able to review them from home rather than driving back up to the library in Madison, Wisconsin, or having to go to the New York City Public Library for the Bluefield's papers. It does not hurt to send requests or suggestions to the various companies. Be warned that some are more responsive than others are.

Within a month I noticed a GenealogyBank blog entry that listed their newly added content. One of the entries was the Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA) 1/23/1861 to 7/22/1901. Probably not as a result of my request but greatly appreciated.

I started searching by name for the desired information and did not find it. I did a search for a known column name in the paper and the year of 1890. I figured it would return an entry for every issue. After sorting from oldest to newest, it showed that the papers did not include any 1890 papers before June 11th. Maybe this was a result of my request, but more than likely it was because the necessary film was either missing or it needed additional time for processing.

Edward Neuhaus

I then shifted my attention to searching for more information about Edward Neuhaus who had arrived by ship in June 1900. Again, I did not find any results about his arrival on the ship or of him checking into a hotel.

Illustration – insert 63-2Bockman-Index-ScanFig1 – Caption: (Search Results of "Neuhaus")