Thursday, February 29, 2024

New Info Thanks to Keyword Added to Newspaper Search

I'm preparing a photo book about hubby's paternal grandparents, Mary Slatter (1869-1925) and James Edgar Wood (1871-1939). In the process, I'm redoing my research to try to get more info about the work, interests, and family life of their siblings.

George Black (1850-1934) married hubby's great aunt, Jane Wood (1846-1936) about 1898 in Toledo, Ohio. It was her first marriage, his second, according to Census data. Another detail from the Census: George Black was blind. 

Looking for newspaper mentions, I searched on GenealogyBank.com using his name, date range, and home town of Toledo, Ohio. Too many results for a common name. Adding his wife's name was not much help.

Then I tried something a little different, as shown at left: I used "blind" as a keyword in my search. (Great tip: Lisa Gorrell recommends trying an address--maybe a street name--as a keyword.)

Immediately I got a much smaller number of hits, including several news items that actually told me something fascinating about this man's life.

I learned that George helped organize blind people in his city and county, to advocate for legislative action and other actions to help the blind. In fact, he was elected as a trustee of the new organization in December, 1907. Happy to see that George was so active in his community!

Now I'm going to see if I can think up an appropriate keyword for each of the ancestors I'm researching, if their names are fairly common. Maybe a word like their occupation or another characteristic. This will hopefully narrow my search just enough to make the results more meaningful and manageable. 

1 comment:

  1. A great tip on using keywords to help narrow a search. Putting an address in the keywords is an idea, too.

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