by Janet Tabares
The Penny Pinchers Guide to Genealogy Part 1
by Janet Tabares
Chapter
1 - Free Lookups.
There are some wonderful individuals out there that are willing to do lookups
for you from resources that they have in their possession. Usually a researcher
will have immediate access to a small number of materials. Please understand
that these folks are doing so out of the goodness of their heart. They DON'T
HAVE TO! They choose to so if it takes longer than you think it should, just
remember that they have lives and research to do too! They are NOT your personal
researcher. They may get anywhere from one to a hundred requests per day.
Filling all of these requests can be very time consuming, and downright
tiresome.
When requesting a lookup from someone, include relevant information only. Don't
get into a long story about how you are new to this, that your great-aunt so and
so was responsible for tons of information donated to the DAR library, and that
you have three cats. All you need to say is that you'd like a lookup from book
____ and that the surname is _____. You may give additional info such as other
lines that are associated with the surname. This may help narrow down the
information to what you actually need. This is especially helpful in the case of
a name like SMITH. They may find 200 SMITHs in a given reference, but only five
that are associated with the WILLIAMs family in that town.
Some may request the cost of copying and mailing, some may just send you an
abstraction in the form of an email. This is the most common form–its quick,
easy and doesn't cost anyone anything. You can offer to reciprocate the favor if
you have time to run to the local library or have a reference that you can do
lookups in. This is considered common courtesy in the genealogy world.
There are many ways to find folks doing lookups. One is to run a search on the
Internet. I ran a search on Webcrawler and got 1008 results. Obviously, I
wouldn't need to check all of these sites, since my ancestors are located in
just a few areas of the country, but its great that there are that many results
on just one search engine. Also, remember not all the results will be genealogy
related, so be prepared to sift through those as well.
If you want to search the web for "lookups" here are a few search
engines that might help you with your search.
http://www.webcrawler.com/
Other places to find lookups is on US Genweb sites. The lookups are scattered
and not every site will have lookups available. If you are able to look things
up for a given area volunteer to do lookups. Contact the
State/County that your references are applicable to and let them know that you
volunteer. Chances are a single volunteer can spark others to do so as well.
You can find US Genweb at http://www.usgenweb.com/
From there go to the State that you're interested in then the County.