14 September 2013

One Page at a Time

No matter how many indexes exist or how accurate they supposedly are, if you have good reason to believe your person should be in a record, a page by page search may be necessary.

As humans, indexers are fallible.As researchers who occasionally make mistakes as well, we should not expect them to be perfect.

1 comment:

  1. Sometimes there is NO index. My ancestor, Frederick Ertel purchased land in September 1860 in Adams Co., IL. There is no county-wide deed index for that time period. Fortunately, I had found him in the 1870 census in Liberty. A page by page search in the Index to deeds for Liberty Township yielded results after 170+ pages!

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