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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Online Search Strategies for Genealogists – An Interview with David Fryxell
00:33:42
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by VoiceGift. What if your family tree could speak? VoiceGift helps preserve the voices and stories that define your family so they're never lost to time Record memories from parents and grandparents and link them to photos, albums and heirlooms. Inspired by museum audio guides and designed to last, VoiceGift Play is an audio time capsule for generations. Find your voice@www.voice.gift. that's www.voice gift. Each website we use for genealogy has its own quirks and best practices, but some strategies are common to a wide swath of search engines and databases. Google, Ancestry.com, familySearch, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage, to name a few. Here to share some non denominational online search tips is Family Tree magazine's founding editor, David A. Frick, author of an article in the January February issue called Star Search. Welcome back to the podcast, David.
- [01:03]
B
Thanks for having me.
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A
So I said that this article came out in the January February 2026 issue, but you actually wrote on this subject way back in 2016, 10 years ago. What about searching online has changed since then and what has stayed the same?
- [01:22]
B
Yes, it was sort of recycled, I guess, but so much has changed that it was pretty darn new. I think the biggest difference is back then we were really thinking more of the Internet, you know, and a lot of the tips were for just sort of general Internet searching. But these days it just seems like a lot more of the what you're really looking for is in some of those big like databases and sites that you mentioned. So it's probably more important to figure out tricks for searching, ancestry and family search and so forth. I think back, you know, 10 years ago there was more the feeling of, you know, it's a big wide world Internet and there's all kinds of crazy stuff out there. And we're always discovering new websites now, although obviously there are exceptions. Foreign sites, for example, and individual state sites. But so much of the data is now concentrated in a relatively small handful of sites, at least in terms of searching and extracting data. So, you know, you really need to be a good ancestry and find my past and familysearch searcher as opposed to just sort of wandering out there in the Internet.
- [02:32]
A
Right. That consolidation really is key that as these companies merge and acquire new websites, that there is a little bit of a homogenization happening maybe. I'm working on an article right now on French genealogy websites, for example, Genet, Annette and Vilay, both part of those ancestry and myheritage ecosystem so you start to see that overlap and not that.
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B
Long ago they were just completely on their own and independent and then they get gobbled up. I guess you can still search them in their original universes, but now you find them with the biggies.
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A
Right. And one of these search terms that's kind of stood the test of time, these strategies are Boolean terms. Can you talk about what those are? What are the most common ones and what do they do?
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B
Well, yeah, they're. And obviously this goes back to like the early days of I guess logic more than even computers. Terms like and or having one wasn't inclusive, one's an either or kind of thing. Not in some sites you can use terms like near. There's enclosing things in parentheses, enclosing in quote marks, things like that. So they're, they're really basic. If you know, if you studied logic in I don't know, high school, you might come across all the, all these terms. But. And the trick I guess these days is not all the sites necessarily use those terms as such, but some of them assume that you're using one or the other like the and or is the is the obvious thing is that some sites when you if assume that you mean and you know it means you know, Smith and Virginia, whereas others assume or Smith or Virginia. So trying to figure that out can be know kind of a challenge.
- [04:35]
A
And that makes a big difference too.
- [04:39]
B
Takes it out of your hands.
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A
Right. It's a much more narrow field that you're searching as opposed to the or operator there.
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C
Right.
- [04:47]
A
So and, and or give the search engine a little more context. We want these terms together or we want them one or the other sort of and or the other. You can also tell the search engine to not include a certain term. One that comes to mind for me is I have a surname Winter. So if I'm searching a database for winter, I might say winter, not snow, not season. And that would probably be helpful for the, the Smiths out there.
- [05:16]
B
And the and some of those are you can use plus or minus for the, you know, to mean the same. So often you have a minus sign meaning, you know, I don't want all those winter sites that you know, 10 great witter hobbies or something.
- [05:31]
A
Sure. Right. Because that can really kind of mess up especially with these new full text search that FamilySearch has where it's searching a broader lexicon I guess if you will, of you're sifting through more language, you're going to pick up more of those kind of common nouns.
- [05:46]
B
That you have to be really smart in any kind of full text search for just that reason that you could get so many false, you know, positives there. That makes the searching almost useless if you're not really smart about it. And you know, kind of, okay, what am I really looking for? What are the unique terms that will pop out that I can use to find what I'm looking for and what are terms that are just going to, you know, make a mess of it?
- [06:14]
A
Right. And the strategy is especially important with these websites getting bigger and bigger. That's more and more data to sift through and the same size entry point, if that makes sense. That.
- [06:23]
B
Yeah, exactly. Well, sometimes, you know, ancestry is a good example that instead of using just sort of the all over search, if you think, well, what am I looking for? I'm looking for an immigration or passengers list. So I'll, I'll just search the immigration and you know, passenger list search rather than the overall search which gets me family trees and census and you know, all that stuff. So I think honing, particularly when they've globbed it all together, that honing exactly what you want to search, you know, what is my goal in this particular search, can help a lot.
- [07:01]
A
Right. And that's helpful not just because you're searching a smaller group of records, but the search forms themselves change.
- [07:07]
B
You know, if you're searching the immigration, for example, you'll get the option of like arrival or departure or something like that. Whereas if you're just doing the overall ancestry search, that usually is not even an option. And that might be the most important thing in narrowing it down. Well, I know they left about 1873, so you want to be able to put that in. And if you can't, then you're far behind.
- [07:30]
A
And now a word from our sponsor. I'm here with Jeffrey Stern. He is the founder and CEO of VoiceGift. Welcome to the podcast, Jeffrey.
- [07:39]
C
Andrew, it's an absolute pleasure to be here and to become introduced to the family tree audience. I've been in the audio business for 20 years. I've sold maybe 60 million sounds, some people say annoying sounds, to build a bear workshop. But through that I really learned to understand the power of voice and sounds to trigger emotions and memories. And so you can imagine how excited I am to be going to woo Tech in March and to being introduced to the whole memory, legacy, heritage industry.
- [08:20]
A
Yeah. And I think that power of voice is so prevalent in family history. You know, you hear your grandparents voice and it immediately sends you back in a way that, you know, other other sensory experiences maybe don't. And I think that's sort of what's at the core of this new product that you've developed, right?
- [08:41]
C
Yeah. Well, I mean, let me give you a little bit of background. It's called Play and it looks like, o, I don't know, a remote control. It's basically modeled after those audio guides that people of my age remember when we went to museums, and usually they were black and tech looking and they gave you headphones and you'd walk around the museum and next to a statue or big picture, you'd have a little number and you'd get to hear from the curator and they would basically create the context for your experience. And I said, why shouldn't we have a consumer version of that? But unlike the professional version, we want to hear your voice as well. Because in addition to being a trigger for emotion and memory, when you can not only listen but record audio, it takes all of that heritage legacy material and it repurposes it. If you think of all the time that we spend collecting memories and, you know better than I do, all of the tech that's used, all of the hours and the research, and then you actually have an archive and then people, you want people to interact with it. And sometimes that interaction will be having an elderly person record what it was like to be in the civil rights movement, or an aunt to record what it was like to pierce the women's liberation barrier. But then you might also want to hear how that affects the children or the next generation. How they might look at a picture and say, that person looks eerily like me, or ask a question and hand it over. I mean, oral histories are something that's been around for a while. My dad did one of his mother, my grandmother. But audio is coming back. People are doing voice texts, people are writing voice or audio journals. It's a lot easier. It's a more, you know, it's the most. I would go organic and seamless way of communicating. The first thing a baby sense they have is to hear and then, and then to speak. And so it's very visceral. And what's exciting to me after launching this product is seeing how people in the memory making space are using it. I knew that from Build a Bear. So many people come in with that last recording on a tape machine and they want to preserve its posterity and they want to put it on five teddy bears. The beautiful thing about our dev is basically you enter a number and you record a message. You enter A number and you play back that message. And because it has, you know, 10 numbers, it can hold 999 messages split between 10 hours. So virtually there's no limit to its capacity. We love the fact that it doesn't have a screen, you don't need a subscription, you don't have to put QR codes all over the place. Basically what we've developed is a kind of a work ethic where you take a little sticker. We love these repositionable removable stickers that won't harm where they're on. You take a pencil, you write on the back of a photo or in the margin, you put the sticker on and then you invite people to record around holidays. It's amazing, but it just means that all of the archival work that we do can live on. It can live on. It can be part of a conversation. So there's a built in microphone which makes it, it. So you know, you impulsively, you can add that voice. But there's also a USB cable and that's for charging it, but also for backing it up. Because trust me, you are going to capture some amazing archival audio. But also, if you could imagine going to one of these wonderful publishers and making five or 10 books about a wedding, about a trip, about the family history, and then passing a play around and having everybody record their impressions, their memories. Then you plug it into your PC and you copy it onto nine other devices. So it becomes something that's easily to duplicate, easily to save. Some people actually use it just to capture the audio because it's so easy and, and easy to do. So it's, I, I love, I love the device, but more so I love the way people are talking to us about it and, and thinking of new ways to use.
- [13:37]
A
Sounds like it can be both a way of recording sort of first hand memories as well as offering somebody else an audio tour of your research. So it has that dual functionality like you said, that has, it sounds like it has a very, it's a very diverse tool that way.
- [13:54]
C
You know, I just did a workshop and what I suggested for people who are using it is don't start with the number one, start with five, then go to 10, 15, skip. Because ultimately what will happen is after you do that, as you say, the introduction to the book, say I was privileged to gather this material, then people can go ahead and add page 6 and 7 and 8, they can add an introduction, an acknowledgement, all in audio. And if you think of the power of voice, this also opens up our content for the young before they can read, and for the elderly who have problems reading it. Just the power of audio is, I think, growing and growing as people understand what it can do. You can record the music of an era and put it or the music that was danced to at a wedding, and that changes the whole experience of looking at a wedding album. I love the fact of what it does in terms of the product and the things that it delivers, but I also love the process of gathering around that shoebox. If you can imagine a shoebox with 80 images in it and you're picking them out around the Thanksgiving table, and all of a sudden somebody grabs it and starts talking, all you got to do is put a little notation on it, and then you throw the play back in the shoebox and guess what you have A time capsule, an audio time capsule of everything that's in there. It's really exc. Exciting.
- [15:28]
A
The product is the Play Universal Voice Recorder. The company is VoiceGift. And we're so glad you joined us here today, Jeffrey. And we'll see you at RootsTech.
- [15:37]
C
Yes, our website is www.voice.gift. there's no.com after that. It's just Voice Gift. We're looking forward to being at RootsTech. We're going to actually have a contest, so keep your eyes open for it, of people that come up with ideas as to how to use the in memory making and collecting. And we're going to hand out a whole bunch of plays at the show. Really look forward to seeing you all there and getting to know the industry one person at a time.
- [16:11]
A
Excellent. Thank you, Jeffrey.
- [16:13]
C
Thank you.
- [16:14]
A
And now back to our interview with David Fruxell. So that's Boolean terms. And we touched a little bit on the different search forms, the general search format of site, the empty search bar at the top of your browser, versus something a little more targeted, say, immigration search page. Can you tell us about Wildcard characters, which probably work? Not necessarily at all three of those, but at a lot of them.
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B
Yeah. Fortunately, Wildcard is pretty common, and sometimes they're a little bit different in exactly how they work, the two mostly being an asterisk and a question mark. And depending on the site, usually an asterisk might stand for one or more characters. And so, you know, John would get you Johnson, for example, and a question mark usually is just one character. You know, you never know with the sites, they might mess with that, but that's a general rule. It's really useful because of the. The weird way that, you know, names work particularly with genealogy. So, you know, I have Dickinson's, for example. Well, that. You think that that'd be a common, easy one. But I get Dickerson, I get Dixon, I get, you know, there are all these variations. It could be O, it could be en. So if you use wild cards, you can get around a lot of those problems. Now, a number of sites are sort of good at. They figured this out for you and sort of imagine that you might really mean Dixon as well as Dickerson. But I kind of like to be in control of that and, you know, specify more closely what I'm. What I'm looking for. Because you never know. They might leave, you know, some out, too.
- [18:05]
A
Right. And the nice thing about both Boolean terms and wildcard characters is that you can use them often in combination with each other. So it's not that you. You have to only do one of those at a time. You can kind of use them. In the article you provided a few examples of where you're using quotation marks to indicate I want this exact phrase. But I recognize that, you know, somebody might be mentioned with their first name first or their last name first. So you would want the search engine to pick up George Phillips and. Or Phillips, comma, George.
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B
Right. Yeah. That's an oddity of records. I mean, we're used to a lot of records, particularly modern ones, going with the surname first. And so it'd be easy to just miss those if you're looking for an exact match. And you should just never underestimate the ability of transcriptions to be weird and off. I mean, I often think about. I have Rousseau's in that Dickinson family spelled like the, you know, the. Like Jean Jacques Rousseau. And one guy just eluded me completely until I found him under. As Rousseau R, U, S, S, A W. I mean, no amount of wild cards, admittedly, is going to get that one.
- [19:28]
A
Well, yeah, and there are multiple levels of. There are multiple places where that kind of disconnect can happen. There's. The surname may have been spelled differently by the person. The person creating the record may be misheard or changed the spelling. The family may have anglicized the name, changed it over time. Then there's, as you pointed out, the transcription. So what looked at this, Was it the person creating an index manually? Was it an optical character recognition software at some point in the past where, you know, the accuracy may have been kind of spotty, or did the website apply its own technology? So at any of those points, there could be a disconnect between what you're searching for and how it's going to show up in the database.
- [20:19]
B
Well, and one of the tricks that I think you talk about in the article that would turn up like the missing RUSA is try searching without a last name. If you're stumped, it may be that there's a transcription or other issue. So if you put in enough other stuff, you know, birth year, first name, you know, relatives, even places, anything that you can do, I would always suggest doing, do the bare minimum. Like if you enter a few things and you get 100,000 hits, you probably need more info in there. But if you try doing it without the last name because that I think was the only way I found John Ruso because as I say, no amount of wild cards or anything else would ever have found that very distant spelling.
- [21:09]
A
Yeah. The ability at genealogy websites specifically to add relationships, birth dates as opposed to, if you're on Google, you're crawling so much data that it, you know, is it the year, just a year that happened to be mentioned alongside that name is the year the thing was published. You know, there are so many variables at a big search engine versus yeah. @ancestry.com where if you're on the immigration search form, hey, what year did they arrive and looks for that. The caveat to that though is if you are looking for a particular record that doesn't happen to mention that information, it'll be excluded unless you're, unless you're careful about how you draw that parameter.
- [21:54]
B
Well, that's why you know, the little exact boxes that you can check, you know, those can really trip you up as you mentioned. Like if you have, if you're looking for record and you look for and put in the death date because you know, you know the death date and so you check the exact. Well, any records that don't that occurred before person died are going to be left out because that data is not going to be in there unless he had foreknowledge of his death, I guess. So use, I always say use those exact boxes with, with great care.
- [22:38]
A
That touches upon another question I had which was what's a common mistake that genealogists make when searching?
- [22:43]
B
Well, the exact one is a good. And they're all kind of related. I think the most common is providing too much information at the start because you may miss things that, because of those transcription errors or all those sort of oddities. So it's better to, you know, enter a little bit and get you know, 10,000 hits and then you can narrow it down from there than to be so precise that you actually get zero hits or two and they're wrong.
- [23:18]
A
So it's not there. I can't find it.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's the, oh, my ancestor's missing in the census, you know. Well, probably not, but the way you're looking for him because, oh, maybe his first name is not listed in the census, maybe it's just initials or something. But if you say, you know, and it absolutely has to be Joel exact, then it's not going to show up. So a little knowledge is the danger. You know, a lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing in this case.
- [23:52]
A
Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that the strategy is so important. So if you're looking for an immigration record, what's the arrival date, what's the birth date? That date not going to be very relevant. So you shouldn't search on that if you even have the ability to, depending on.
- [24:06]
B
Unless they made it onshore in a casket, in that case, probably not Right exactly.
- [24:15]
A
Now another big thing that has changed not just in search, not just in genealogy, but in technology generally since 2016 is the evolution of AI. And that's a buzzword everywhere. This Gen issue also had an article on AI, for example. What's a role that you've seen AI playing in online searches?
- [24:35]
B
Well, certainly we see AI beginning to create content in effect or index content, like what MyHeritage is doing with their old news site that there's a lot of. Suddenly I'm getting all these emails from MyHeritage that says we found these things in old news and I've actually gotten a fair amount of good stuff from that. You mentioned The FamilySearch using AI, the Archive Digital, the Swedish side I use a lot. My Swedes is doing the same kind of thing of making documents available. Of course then on the search, I mean, I confess, like when I use Google and has the little AI thing shows up at the top, I tend to look at that first and maybe only. Which I'm not sure that's actually a good idea on my part because there may be other things, you know, down below and I mean the related thing is I just saw a thing the other day that the AI and that sort of search is really hurting a lot of websites because I'm just seeing the stuff at the top and I'm not actually clicking on the sites listed down below which is killing their traffic. So that may long term have a have an effect on genealogy websites that if you're just sort of scooping the key information out at some point, those sites, if they're ad supported, they're not gonna, not gonna make it.
- [26:08]
A
Right. And the Google summary is a good example of when a lot of people are thinking about AI now they're not thinking about the algorithm that has been operating search engines forever or yeah, a record match system at a genealogy website. They're thinking about chat GTP or a Google summary. And that's a different tool than here's some information, an information retrieval, like a database retrieval query. It's generating something new from here's a.
- [26:47]
B
Website where you can maybe find that information about your ancestor. I mean, here's a silly example the other night, there's an ad for, I think progressive insurance where the father is trying to explain the facts of life to the kid and then he gets, there's a substitute and the actor who plays the father looked familiar. And so I googled of course, to see who's the actor, blah, blah, blah. And the answer that came back is a different actor who also is in commercials, who is a much older, different race actor who plays Dr. Rick. And looking at this, I'm like, this is ridiculous. Well, so now I worry what other answers that I'm getting maybe from my genealogy are equally ridiculous. But I, because I don't know the answer. I don't know it's ridiculous. So I mean, I, when I did the article, I tried a little bit of AI searching, you know, at the end, and most of the results were not very terribly useful. And one in fact referred to something completely different and sent me a link to, gave me a link to a video that was a completely different person, not my ancestor at all. So now I'm like in the grain of salt universe here of be careful.
- [28:06]
A
Right. And I thought it was interesting you made a point to say an ancestry got that person on the first page, like it was not competition. That's another thing I think sometimes people expect a chatbot to be able to do is, hey, tell me about this specific ancestor. It'll give you an answer. But it. Whether that answer is based in any kind of fact is a separate issue.
- [28:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's useful for like I've been in a series of meetings about some AV equipment and we've used their phone and I think it's. They use Otter to transcribe the entire thing. At one point, however, I think, I gather Otter decided that two of the participants in the meeting were having an argument and were fighting. That didn't happen. But on the other hand, the fact that it could transcribe the entire Thing was pretty amazing, but still, the little landmines there.
- [29:04]
A
Sure. And so this last question I have for you is a little bit of a thinker. And some of our listeners will have been researching their ancestors for a long time, before online records were widespread. And keyword searching, as we've been talking about it today, is kind of a different skill from what you were doing 30 years ago, even longer ago, in terms of going to a library and manually going through a catalog or scrolling through microfilm. Can you talk a little bit about what that skill set is like for the modern genealogist versus maybe how people started doing genealogy decades ago?
- [29:46]
B
Well, it really is different. You know, you're right.
- [29:48]
A
The.
- [29:49]
B
The whole strategy of what should I search for? How can I get the most results but not too many results? How can I avoid losing, you know, good results? It's an entirely different sort of mindset from, you know, when I would go to the Family History center there in Cincinnati and scroll through microfilm of my Swedish ancestors. And there, you know, the skills mostly were, you know, stick to itiveness, you know, having your eyes not go bad on you and figuring out how to spot things. I would say the one similarity is when you're looking at microfilm and doing those. Some sort of those things, sometimes there are things that you can use as clues. So, for example, in the Swedish records, they almost all give the person's birth date. Well, so I learned to just scroll and look for that birthday in this mound of very difficult to read handwriting in a way that's similar to what is the one thing I can use in an ancestry search to find the person? Well, what facts do I know that can really narrow this down? Well, the birth date, you know, if you're really sure about it, as you, you know, as you would be. So, in a sense, some of the skills are the same or are, you know, transferable. But there's certainly a lot less scrolling and eye strain.
- [31:22]
A
Right. And a lot more time to research since there's a lot less duplicated effort or barking up the wrong tree.
- [31:30]
B
Right. And of course, also, you know, there's the, as we say, the danger of finding information about your ancestors that's not true. You know, bogus family trees and all that sort of stuff. I guess because it's so easy to get to, suddenly you could plug in your ancestor's name and have all this stuff. And so the challenge now becomes sorting through it, figuring out what you really want to add, what's real, what's really your ancestors. Whereas before it's like, oh, my gosh, I found my ancestor in one book.
- [32:03]
C
Great.
- [32:05]
B
I found one census record this week, you know. Okay, great. Whereas. Well, when we found out something about my wife's family, you know, it was on a Sunday afternoon a couple years ago, and thanks to a couple of online sites, I mean, I had the family back to England the early 1800s, like, in that afternoon. And that experience you just would not have in the olden days of scrolling microfilm.
- [32:30]
A
Right. An embarrassment of riches.
- [32:32]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [32:33]
A
It's a lot more about source analysis and looking at citations and primary and secondary sources rather than just finding the thing in the first place.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah. And, you know, it's like, is this. You have more of the question of is this the right ancestor, the right person? Whereas before, you're just thrilled to find something, you know, let's hope it's the right person, because an afternoon.
- [32:59]
A
Well, thank you, David, for coming back to the podcast to talk about search. And the article again is called Star Search. It's in the January February 2026 issue, and I'll link to that in this episode, Show Notes. Thanks so much, David, and look forward to talking to you again soon.
- [33:15]
B
Thanks.
- [33:15]
A
Thanks for joining me. In this month's episode, the Family Tree Magazine podcast, you can find the show notes from this episode and all episodes@familytreemagazine.com podcasts while on our website, you can also sign up for a free email newsletter where you'll receive free genealogy resources each weekday, including links to new podcast episodes as they're released. Until next time, have fun climbing your family tree.