Adding Websites
While it's possible for users to have GenSmarts "search" other websites, most users will find it to be too complex and/or too much work to add a website to GenSmarts on their own.
The reason for this is that list of websites you see in GenSmarts is analogous to "the tip of the iceburg". For each of the websites in that list, we've taken inventories of the website's available record sets and created detailed suggestion rules that reside in your GenSmarts program directory. So the process of adding a website to GenSmarts is considerably more complex than just adding a website URL to a list - it involves taking an inventory of each set of records you might want a suggestion for - the type of record set, the time span covered by the record set, the geography the record set pertains to, etc. For those users that want to give this a try, we provide a facility for doing so in TOOLS...CUSTOMIZE RECORDS...
Another analogy might be to think of that list of websites in GenSmarts like a restaurant menu - you wouldn't expect to be able to pencil in the title of a new item on your menu and expect the waiter to be able to then be able to bring you that dish. At least not without alot more detailed descriptive information for the chef.
Keep in mind that GenSmarts doesn't make suggestions based on knowledge of which specific people are available in a data base. Rather, GenSmarts suggestions are predictions of who should have a logical and reasonable chance of being in a data base. The decision to make a suggestion is based on the above knowledge about the record set itself, matched up with what you know (and what GenSmarts has estimated) about each person in your file.
Also note that not all websites are good candidates to include in GenSmarts suggestions. Good candidates are websites with data bases that tend to include a high percentage (say at least 33% as a guideline) of people that meet the scope of the database. Obviously the bigger the collection, the better - death records from 1890-1892 for a small city in the western US would fit the "good" criteria, but wouldn't be as interesting to most GenSmarts users as source that'll get more hits on people's data. "Not so good" candidates are data bases with wide scope and/or very low percentage coverage. The wide scope means that you'll simly get the same suggestion generated for a large portion of your file... low coverage means that most of the suggestions won't result in anything. This doesn't mean that things that fall into this category aren't worth pursuing, it just means that the current version of GenSmarts isn't the best way to pursue them. We are looking at how these types of things fit in, and hope to address them in the future.
Good examples:
The 1850 Illinois census... if you lived in Illinois in 1850 (the scope of these records), then there's a high probability you'll be there.
US Civil War Records... if you were a young male in 1860, then there's a "worth pursuing" probablity that you were a soldier in the war.
Not as good examples:
Google... hard to determine what the scope or probability would be.
IGI... the scope is very wide and odds of finding any single person/event relatively low
Here's some free training on our customize records feature: