joshualevy writes...

The Italian Genealogy Group in New York City has several

very useful databases on line and free:

Deaths: http://www.italiangen.org/NYCDeathSearch.stm

Naturalizations:

http://www.italiangen.org/southersearch.stm
              
              http://www.italiangen.org/bronxsearch.stm
              
              http://www.italiangen.org/nassausearch.stm
              
              (and several more)
              

Also, Could you have a "sticky" topic in this forum

that describes what is a "good" Research Location: one

you would like to add to the program? In many of the

replies you say why a location is not good, but I don't

see a list of what we should be looking for in a good

research location.

Joshua Levy

On 2004-04-29 12:12am GenSmarts replied...

Good idea on having some guidelines, we'll see if we can't get something written up that captures and, as you said, make it a sticky. We'll take an initial crack at it below.

What makes a good database for GenSmarts:

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.

What makes a "not so good" database for GenSmarts:

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

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