September 14, 2012
We often get this question: What do I do when the surname I’m searching for generates thousands of hits because it is a common word (like Brown, Green or Coffee)?
Yes, searching for information on ancestors with ambiguous surnames can be a problem.
GenealogyBank often recommends searching using only the surname as the best way to maximize your search result hits and find the best target articles about your ancestor.
But a surname such as “Coffee” certainly can generate a lot of extra newspaper articles.
Scanning this list of search results we can quickly see articles about coffee roasters, flavor and other irrelevant articles—clearly not what the genealogist is looking for.
How do you find the genealogy records you are looking for?
GenealogyBank’s search results page has search tools to help you eliminate some of those extra newspaper articles and increase the likelihood of finding articles about your Coffee ancestor.
Look closely at the left column on the search results page. That is a list of “article types.”
GenealogyBank classifies the articles in our collection of over 6,100 newspapers into types: Historical Obituaries, Marriage Records, etc.
These article types can really help narrow the results of your genealogy search for your Coffee ancestor.
For example, try clicking on “Historical Obituaries.”
Now we’re not seeing any articles about coffee roasters or flavors of coffee—most of these obituary search results are about deceased people named Coffee.
If we click on “Marriage Records” we see similar results.
We can immediately see that these articles are mostly marriage and wedding announcements for people with the surname “Coffee.”
This genealogy search approach will save family history researchers a lot of time by limiting the website’s search results to the ones you want to use to document your family. The results will still include obituaries or marriage records that contain the word “coffee” in the text of the article. For example, perhaps the person was not named Coffee, but instead was employed by a coffee company or lived in Coffee City, Texas. The word “coffee” might appear in these articles for all types of reasons, but at least this genealogy search tip will help you get more relevant articles about Coffee the person, not the object. When looking for your ancestors, use GenealogyBank’s “article types” to better focus your search results.
If your last name is a common word it can be an indicator of your ancestors’ lives. For example, did you know that the Miller last name origin began as an occupational surname for a “miller.” Many last names reflected a profession or specific lineage. Learn what your last name means and where it originated.
My ancetor’s name is “Done” which is obviously a past participle of a verb. It is almost impossible to do a search in any general search engine, even using “—“. There are one or two famous people with this surname and even they are difficult to locate. Even Ancestry.com hates them and suggests all sorts of alternative names like Donne, Don, Dane, Dean, Donno etc. I would love to be able to search English and US newspapers but it has seemed impossible. Luckily in Australia the National Library indexing for newspapers (Trove) allows use of a common word as a name during a search and the Ryerson Index of deaths recorded in newspapers allows anything as a name. If there is any way to persuade a common seach engine like Google’s to narrow down searches to names that are common words, I would love to use it!