You Better Browse

Search boxes that allow us to quickly find census and other records have changed the way genealogists locate many records and save time.

However, there is still an advantage to browsing through that census record when one family has been located using an index. Read other names on the same page and adjacent pages. There may be other family members you did not think to look for, or whose names are so mangled they were not located using indexes. Also pay attention to the places of birth for these near neighbors-they may have followed the same path of migration as your ancestor as well.