Chatted with a retired librarian that flipped my research habits upside down

I was at a coffee shop downtown last Saturday and this older woman saw me digging through a book on my phone. She asked what I was searching for, I told her I was trying to track down some old census data for a family tree project. She laughed and said I was wasting time on modern search engines, then showed me how to use the Library of Congress digital collections with specific date filters. Turns out I was missing like 40% of the records because I wasn't narrowing by county instead of state. Has anyone else gotten a tip from a random stranger that totally changed how you look up historical info?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_jake4d ago

The county vs state filter thing is huge. I found a whole batch of 1880s land deeds my grandpa never knew existed just by doing that exact switch on FamilySearch. Old people who actually worked with paper records their whole lives know all the tricks we miss.

cole_murphy4d ago

A friend of mine found his great uncle's whole Civil War pension file doing that same county level trick on Fold3.

emery104d ago

I remember reading someone say their dad found a marriage record from 1870 by just changing the county field. It's wild how much stuff gets misfiled in these databases.