 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover various commission activities and any other things that we may be of interest to librarians across the state. We have commission staff do sessions as we have today and we have guest speakers sometimes. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They are free and they are recorded. So if you're unable to attend a live session, you can always listen to our recordings and we have about over a year and a half now of recordings out there. So take a look at them. You might find something interesting and done in the past. And we do a mixture of all sorts of different things. We do presentations. We do little, sometimes called mini training sessions, interviews, web tours, just interviews with people. All sorts of different things are out there that you can find. This morning we have Susan Nisley from here at the Library Commission who is going to talk about HeritageQuest online. One of the databases we have available through our Nebraska Access. So I'm going to pass things over to her and let her take it away. Okay, thanks Krista. As Krista said, my name is Susan Nisley and I'm the online services librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And one of the things I do is do database training. And the database we are going to talk about today is HeritageQuest online. And I want to start out giving you a bit of background about what is HeritageQuest online. It's an online genealogy and local history database and it's designed specifically for patrons in public libraries. There used to be a commercial version of HeritageQuest online available and that sometimes caused some confusion. I did some recent searching and I wasn't able to find the commercial site anymore so I'm not aware of whether or not that has ceased. This is one of a number of different databases that we provide statewide access to through the Nebraska Library Commission's database program. And it can be accessed via our Nebraska Access databases page using a password that can be obtained from your local library or a Nebraska driver's license or state ID number. So this is something that patrons can access from home. And I think it is a fairly popular database for people to access from home since genealogy is a strong area of interest for lots of our residents in Nebraska. You can go to the main Nebraska Access home page and click on a link to access the databases page. Or I've included the URL down here at the bottom that takes you straight to the page that lists all the databases. The census is the mainstay of HeritageQuest online but it actually is up to six different modules now in HeritageQuest online. There's the United States Federal Census from 1790 to 1930. There is a books module which contains a digitized version of a ProQuest microfilm collection, the genealogy and local history files, which consists of over 28,000 family and local history books that have been digitized. A third module is Percy, the Periodical Source Index, put out by Allen County Public Library Foundation, Revolutionary War Era Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, Freedman's Bank Registers, and most recently they added US Serial Set Files, specifically Memorial Petitions and Private Relief Actions. We're going to spend the majority of our time this morning talking about the census because that is probably the most popular module or file within HeritageQuest online, but I will try to at least touch on the other files time permitting. I think that searching the US Census through HeritageQuest online is not particularly intuitive. The more background information you have about how the searching works and how the files are set up, the more successful you will be. So I do have quite a few tips and tricks that I want to pass on to you before we actually do any searching. As I said, HeritageQuest online contains digitized images of each of the decennial censuses from 1790 to 1930. A common question that you will get from patrons is, why can't I search the 1940 census or the 1950 census? Experienced genealogists will know the answer, but if it's somebody just getting started, they might not be aware of this. But census records, access to census records is restricted for 72 years. This is done for privacy considerations. The reason it's 72 years is that was the average lifespan at the time that the legislation was passed. So what that means is that the 1940 census files won't be released until 2012. So that is something that's coming up and will be interesting to see if those files get added to HeritageQuest online or not. So it's only 1790 through 1930. Do you know, Susan? I know this is very similar to copyright and that kind of thing of also to look father is dead and whatnot. Has there been any move to change this at all on this side of it, or do people really not care as much? I'm sure 72 sounds good. That's something I don't really have any idea of, and that sort of brings up a point that I'm really not a genealogist. And I have worked with HeritageQuest online enough so that I'm pretty familiar with it. But if you ask me a question, like Christa just asked that requires genealogical knowledge above and beyond HeritageQuest online. I'm not always the best person to answer that question. Well, hopefully the people at HeritageQuest would let you know as a person, training this if there's something like that. Since we just subscribed to it for the Nebraska Access. And certainly feel free to ask questions. And if I don't know the answer, there might be someone else who is attending this session that knows more about genealogy overall than I do. And they may be able to answer that question. I know that happens a lot in our classes. We have people who have a lot of general genealogical information. The second thing to keep in mind about HeritageQuest online is that it contains name indexes for only 12 of the decennial censuses. And the reason this is important to realize is that you can only search on census years that have been indexed. All of the census data is available, but if you want to locate information in the census year that hasn't been indexed yet, you have to browse it. And I'm going to show you how to do searching and browsing, but that's something to be aware of. I have recreated or I've got a screenshot of the left-hand column of the census search screen, and you will see they list the decennial censuses that are available for searching. So you've got a gap between 1820 and 1860. You cannot search the 1830, 1840, or 1850 census. Then if you'll notice 1930, it says it's only partially searchable. So they've indexed a portion of it, and the remainder of it is available, but it has to be browsed. So again, that's something to be aware of. Something else that I always remind people, even if you're searching for information in a census year that's indexed, if you're not having luck with your search, you still may want to resort to browsing because sometimes you will do all sorts of factors. Your search might not work, and you may have to just browse through the census pages in order to identify your ancestor. So keep in mind that there are two ways to access information, searching and browsing. Also important to be aware of, the only names that you can search on within the census are those belonging to head of household. Census enumerators would list as the head of household, the person who was responsible for the care of the home or the family. Typically this would be the husband slash father in the household, but it could also be a widow with children or a person living alone. There were exceptions. For instance, anyone who lived in a household that had a different last name than other people in the household would also be indexed and searchable. So that might be a mother-in-law, a boarder, a servant or a niece. Also, all individuals who are living in institutions such as schools or prisons or hospitals would be individually indexed. So again, they're searchable. Again, this is something that you really have to keep in mind when you're searching. If you're trying to find information on your great-grandmother, for instance, and she was during a particular census year, your great-grandfather was still alive and she was living with him, you would have to search on his name, find his name in the census, and then look underneath his name on the page to find her name. Also, if you're looking for your great-grandfather and you happen to be looking or searching in a particular census year in which he would have been a child, you're not going to be able to find him searching on his name. You're going to have to search on the head of household names or probably his father's name. So that's information that can make a big difference in the effectiveness of your search. So just keep that in mind. You have to be able to search on the head of household name. The 1890 census. If you have people who are hardcore genealogists, they will know that over 99% of the 1890 census was destroyed by fire. So there's just a small fragment left with about 6,000 names on it. And I've listed some of the states from which that information is still available. So you can search for your ancestors in the 1890 census, but the chances of finding your particular relatives in that census are slim. You might get lucky, but the odds are stacked against you, I think. So that, again, is something to be aware of. And of course Nebraska's not listed. Right, of course Nebraska's not listed, yeah. And even within these states, I didn't go down and list this information. It's particular counties. So even with these states, there's no guarantee that you're going to have luck. Okay, I just want to go ahead and go through the other files quickly here, too. And just talk a little bit about them before we actually go out live and do the searching. The book Search, as I said, lets you look for information on people and places described in over 28,000 family and local history books. And keep in mind that there are lots of local history books that are Nebraska-specific. There are county histories that you will find in here, information about particular cities, information about the state as a whole. So you can find Nebraska-related books in this file. Now this is both a positive and a negative. Every word of every book is searchable. So it's a very powerful search that you can perform. You can find a passing reference to a name in a book. The downside is that you can get overwhelmed with results as well. You don't necessarily want to do a search for Nebraska in a book. You're going to get possibly thousands of results. So it's powerful, but you can also get overwhelmed. There are four search options, and we'll go through these once we're actually out live on the site. You can search for people, places. You can browse publications, and you can search publications. I mentioned earlier that one of the files is Percy, which stands for Periodical Source Index. And this is a subject index to articles in 6,500-plus genealogy and local history periodicals. And these are the types of publications that you're not going to find indexed in standard periodical indexes like EBSCO or Wilson. These are not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, these are small publications put out by local historical societies or genealogical societies. And so it's really hard to get access to that kind of information, and so Percy is a great way to get access to that, to those types of articles that are in those hard-to-find periodicals. It's produced in cooperation with the Allen County Public Library Foundation in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and it's based on their holding. So they actually own all the periodicals that the indexed articles appear in. Unfortunately, there's no full text available through this periodical database. It's just brief citation, so you would then have to go out and either request the article through Interlibrary Loan, which you certainly can do, or there is a form that allows you to request it directly from the Allen County Public Library, and I'll show you how to get access to that form as well. Just to give you a little bit of background on the Revolutionary War pension and bounty land application files, beginning in 1776 and continuing into the mid-1800s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that provided pensions to individuals who served in the Revolutionary War, and over time they would pass additional legislation that would broaden or change the criteria that people had to meet in order to be eligible for these pensions or bounty land warrants, which is why over the years you have more and more people applying as the requirements changed. So it started out if you were disabled while you were serving the Revolutionary War, you were eligible to apply. Then it became veterans who had served a certain number of years, eventually widows whose husbands had been killed in the war could apply, and then widows of veterans who had served a certain number of years. The reason that these files are of interest to genealogists is that, first of all, people had to provide some sort of evidence or documentation that they had served in the military during the Revolutionary War, so you often have sworn affidavits talking about their military service. If the person who is applying for the pension or the bounty land warrant is a spouse or widow or children, then they might have to provide information that proved that they were married, marriage records, birth records, wills, things like that, and so genealogists find lots of family history information in these files. The Freedman's Bank was actually established in 1865 to benefit freed slaves, and it served this purpose until 1874 when it went out of business. It's of interest to genealogists because in addition to including the name of the person who had made the deposit, the files also often contain information about where the person was born, where they were raised, what their current occupation is, family members, parents, children, brothers and sisters. So a lot of personal family history information. This screen just lists the type of information that may be found in the register, but certainly not all of this information is available for each record. Actually, I think this would be an interesting file or an interesting module to use in schools with students who are studying Civil War and the period afterwards because it really does bring the history home in a way that textbooks maybe don't. They track complexion of the person who is making the deposit, which is something that seems incomprehensible to us today. It really does bring it home, this is what it was like right then. For some people they will say, and I don't think it's a controlled vocabulary, so whoever was writing down the information, they'd say dark, black, or yellow. It sort of brings you up short, you're not used to seeing that kind of information. Also, sometimes when they've been asking the depositor information about parents or sisters or children, they will say something like, I had two sisters, but they were sold, and I don't know where they are now, which again brings it home. So even if you're not looking for your own personal family history, I think this could be interesting in a school environment since it's a primary type document. Finally, the most recent files that they added were U.S. serial set records, and these are documents associated with different private laws that were passed by Congress that related to just a particular individual. You find lots of documents related to efforts to, for instance, bring an adopted child from another country into the United States, or bring a spouse from another country into the United States. They had to get special permission for that. You can find claims for restitution for losses suffered during World War II by Japanese Americans who were sent to camps and lost businesses, et cetera. So again, lots of interesting information from a historical point perspective, but also if one of these people is your family member, you can find lots of interesting information too. Okay, so now we actually get to go out and do the actual demo. So let's go ahead and switch gears here if I can't remember how to do it here. Okay, this is the Made in Nebraska Access home page that you get to when you go to Nebraskaaccess.ne.gov. From here, in order to access the databases, you can click on Databases Available to Nebraska's, and this takes you to a page that lists all the databases available. And so we've got HeritageQuest online listed under General Reference. When we click on the HeritageQuest online link, that's going to take us into the database. But before we do that, I just want to point out there's a little question mark behind HeritageQuest online, and you can click on that, and when you do so, it takes you to an About HeritageQuest online page. And there are a couple of documents in particular that I want to point out to you here. I'll reference them later on when we're in the database, and I just want you to know where you can find them after the fact. The first link I want to point you to is Census Forms 1790-1930. Once we get in and actually look at some of the forms, you will notice that it can be really hard to read the column headings. So it's really hard to tell what information is being collected if you can't read the column headings. Right here, you have access to COS forms, which you can print out, and the nice thing is then you can clearly read what information is being collected in each column. So I'm going to scroll through here until I get to the 1910 Federal Census. Click on it, and I'm going to minimize the sidebar, and you'll see a copy of the blank census form, and I can actually rotate it here so you can see more clearly. And if you print these out, you can clearly read these column headings, and I'll show you when we're, as I said, looking at the real census form how difficult it can be to read these when you're looking at the real thing. So one thing I suggest for public libraries, if you have a lot of patrons who come in and do search the census at your library, it might be useful to print out a whole set of these blank census forms and just have them on hand as a type of key, so if somebody does ask you, what does this column say? You can answer that question for them. The other link I want to point out to you is here it says printing enlarged census images. Printing is not very intuitive within heritage census files, and they have some relative, whoops, sorry, I'm not pointing to the right place, printing enlarged census images. They have detailed step-by-step instructions of how to print, and they have separate versions for each version of Adobe Reader that you might be using. So you'll see why you might want step-by-step instructions when I'm actually going through the process. I just want you to know that you don't have to scribble down notes. They have actually created files for you to help you with that process. Okay, so back to HeritageQuest online. I'm going to go ahead and get in. And we'll start off searching the census. When you first log in, you're taken to the search census and you're taking the basic search screen. You'll see there's also an advanced search screen tab right here, and you'll also see a browse option, and we'll take a look at both of those also. Along the left, you see a list of the census years that are indexed and therefore searchable, so that's just a reminder to you of which years you can actually search. And then you've got basic search options, so a surname. And so I'm going to go ahead and type in Nihart and give a name. I'm going to type in John. I have an option of searching across all searchable census years or selecting a specific census year, and I'm going to search across all. And I have a similar option for state. I can search across all states or I can limit my search to Nebraska. And I'm going to go ahead and limit it to Nebraska in this case. Click on Search, and this next screen will give you information about your search results. You'll see it found a total number of results, two, and then it shows how your results are divided between census years. So there's one result in the 1910 census and one result in the 1920 census. At this point, you have a couple options. If you know that you're specifically interested in looking at the 1910 census result, you can click right on the 1910 census result and go straight to it. If you need a little bit more information about each of the results in order to determine which one is probably relevant, which one is containing information about the person that you're interested in, you can go ahead and click up here on this U.S. Federal Census link that's right to the left of the total results listing. And this takes you to a census index page. In this particular case, it's not as helpful because we've got only two results. But you can imagine if you did a search for someone named John Smith, you might need some of this additional information to help you identify the John Smith you are interested in. This page gives you age, sex, race, birthplace, and then the current location where the person is living. And so sometimes this information can really help you pick out the person that you are interested in. We're going to go ahead and look at the first result, the 1910 result. So I'll click on my heart. At this point, we're actually going in and seeing the actual scanned image from the census. When you do a bit of searching, you'll realize that readability varies greatly from one page to another. Sometimes the scanning is better than others. Sometimes the census enumerator's handwriting is clear and sometimes it's not. In this particular case, what we need to do is just scroll down through the list of names until we get to John Nyhart here on line 91. And I just want to go ahead and scroll through the results and show you what sort of information is captured in 1910. You'll see John Nyhart listed here and on the next line, his wife Mona. If you move to the right, you'll see he's listed as head of household and she's listed as his wife. The next column is sex, so male and female. Next column is race, so both are white. Age, he's 29, she's 25. The next column is married or single, so they are married. The next column is how many years they've been married, they've been married for one year. And then for women, they have two columns that have to do with children. The first column is number of children ever that they've ever had and to the right is a column for number of children still living. The next column is birthplace, so John Nyhart was born in Illinois. Mona was born in New York. If you keep on scrolling to the right, you next have a column that is birthplace of the father, so John Nyhart's father was born in Indiana. Mona's, and I've never been able to figure this out for sure, but I think it's Russia or Prussia-German. Next, you have birthplace of the mother, so Ohio and Indiana. If you keep on going, language spoken is English. His profession is author, hers is sculptor. The next column is type of employment, and they both work at home. And this OA means they work on their own account, so they are self-employed. There are some columns that have to do with literacy and ability to read and write. I think this column means they own their own home, and the next column N means that they have a mortgage on it. And it's a home and not a farm. So that's the sort of information that you can glean the census. And here I just want to point out the column headings of the census form. This is a 200% magnification, and you can see it's pretty difficult to read and see what those column headings say. And I can even bump it up to 400% magnification, but it doesn't really help you read those headings. So that's why those blank census forms come in really handy. Some of your options here, I want to go over with you. Occasionally, you will come up, you'll do a search and you'll retrieve a census form, and you'll scroll through the whole form, and you won't find your person listed on that page. In that case, if you come up to the upper left-hand corner, you'll see that there are two tabs. There's a sub-page A and a sub-page B. We're looking at sub-page B. If you don't find your person listed on sub-page B, you can click on the sub-page A tab, and it will take you to another page, and your person will be listed on that other page. That happens occasionally, not often. You do have the option of viewing a negative version of the form. That's white writing on black background. There's some thinking that sometimes it's easier to read handwriting when it's light on dark. I don't know. It hasn't made much difference for me, but that is an option that's available to you. Then you have your print option. This is where it gets non-intuitive and not very user-friendly. When you want to print, you do not click on the print button. As there are instructions that you can print out telling you, you want to click on download. Then you want to click on View in Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat Reader comes up and you have a census form displayed. If you print it right now, it's going to be stretched across the 8.5-inch width of a piece of paper. It's going to be very hard to read. What you want to do is you want to go ahead and find a snapshot tool, which often appears as a little camera on your toolbar. You may have to go ahead and search through and get that toolbar adjusted so that that snapshot tool appears. You click on the camera, you move your mouse onto the census form, and you'll see that your mouse turns into a little crosshatch. You want to come down and find the name of the person that you want to capture. I think that's right here. You want to move your crosshatch to the upper left-hand corner. Press down with your left mouse button and hold it down and drag. You'll see a little rectangle. You can stretch the rectangle across the area you want to print. When you let go, it tells you that the selected area has been copied. You say OK. Then you come up and you want to be sure that you click on the Acrobat print icon and not the browser print icon. I'm going to click that. You will see that my little section that I have drawn the rectangle around has been up to fit on the piece of paper, so it's been magnified. That doesn't happen automatically all the time. You may have to come over to Page Scaling and select Fit to Printable Area. Sometimes your default setting will just have to show up like that, which isn't really very helpful. You want to fit to Printable Area, and then you're going to get a more readable version for your printout. That is printing. That's why they have created help documents on how to do that. Let's go back to our census form and a couple navigation tips here. You have an option here of going to the previous or next page or the next name. Previous or next page means actually the next page of the 1910 census. That is as if you had the 1910 census in front of you and you were looking at one page, you turned the page and looked at the next page. This actually can be useful because oftentimes family members in communities did live fairly close together, so you might find on the next street you might find some other relatives listed. There are times when you do want to browse page by page through the census files for a particular community. What next name does is it takes you to the next name in your search results. You'll remember we had two results, one from the 1910 census and one from the 1920 census. If I click on next name, it's going to take me to the John Nyhart result from 1920. This is just a good example of what a difference there can be between a census and a numerator's handwriting. This person's handwriting is very clear and uniform. You'll see that 10 years later John and Mona now have three children. I always like to point this out just because it's somewhat interesting. If you scroll over to the right to the profession field, he still lists himself as a writer for a magazine and if you look for her, no longer is she a sculptor now, it says none for profession. I think that says none, doesn't it? So obviously with three children under the age of 10, you don't have a lot of time as a sculptor. I certainly understand that it's interesting to see the change that 10 years makes too. Here's also the Russian handwriting. You can now, it's readable. Oh yeah, I never noticed that. Thank you for pointing that out, Chris. I've been teaching this for years and I never thought to look at another census here. Because you were mentioning the handwriting and everyone was going to be readable. I can't believe I never thought to do that. I guess it wasn't that important to me or something. So that's an example of a basic census search where everything worked while you found the person that you were looking for. I'm going to go ahead and go back to the search form. And now I want to take you to the advanced search screen. And I think it's really important that you become familiar with the advanced search screen because that gives you lots more options for searching. You can still search on surname, given name, census year and state. But you can also type in a county name or a location name, which would be a city or township name. You can specify an age, range, sex, race or birthplace. And I will just point out age, sex, race and birthplace have asterisks. And if you look out at the bottom, it points out that this information was only collected from 1850 forward. So if you choose to use any of these filters or limiters, you are automatically limiting your search to 1850 forward. So that's just something to keep in mind. This is a useful search form if you need to narrow a basic search that retrieves too many hits. For instance, if your relative is named John Smith. It also lets you identify a potential ancestor when you're not sure about their name. And also what you will find is that names are not... There's no authority control in the census. So one year your ancestor whose name was George might be listed as George. Another year they may have just used his first initial G. Another year they might have abbreviated GEO. There are many instances in the census where names are spelled differently from one census year to another. So obviously you have to type it in the way it appeared in order to find it. So there are lots of reasons why a name search might not pull up who you're looking for. Even if you know that they're there. So you have to be creative as far as finding other ways to search. The example that I always use, I always try to find a family that people have some familiarity with. It's not my family. And so the family I've used is Laura Ingalls Wilder since many people have read those books. And this is just an example of how you might sort of cast about and try to... Basically you're just trying to see what you can come up with, find a hook into the census. So let's say I want to find information about Laura's family. I know the family. I know that Laura and Mary were most likely born in Wisconsin. But I also can't search for their names necessarily because they probably weren't listed as head of household. So I just decided I'm going to go ahead and do a search for Ingalls. And I'm going to type in Birthplace Wisconsin just to see what I get. And this is the kind of thing you can do with your own ancestors if you're not sure where to look. And you'll see I get 281 results and they're broken down by census year. And there's no rhyme or reason as far as which one I chose to go in and look at. I just chose 1910. There's 49 results. And this is an example of when you can see that looking at this index page is useful. 49 results sounds like a lot, but you can very quickly scan through 49 names and pick out which one might be of interest. So I was just scrolling through. And all of a sudden I came to Carolyn Ingalls, age 70, born in Wisconsin, and she's living in Dismitt, South Dakota. So anyone who's read the Little House and the Prairie books would immediately perk up and think, I bet that's Ma. So I went ahead and clicked on her last name in order to pull up the record. And the fact that her name was indexed and searchable tells me that Pa had probably died already, so she was the head of household. And if you scroll down here, here we go. Line 19, you've got Carolyn Ingalls listed as head of household. And living with her is Mary, her daughter, and Carolyn, her daughter. If you scroll across, you'll see that Carolyn is 40, I mean, I'm sorry, 70. Mary is 45, and Carolyn, who was Carrie in the books, was 39. Interesting little fact here, Carolyn had five children total, four of whom were still living. And it tells you that she did have a baby that never factored in the, a child who died, who never did, was not featured in the books. Carolyn and Mary were both born in Wisconsin, but Carrie was born in Kansas. So that's an important factor in future census searches. That tells you that 40 years ago, approximately at the time of the 1870 census, you might find the Ingalls family living in Kansas. So that's important information for subsequent searches. Also, you'll see that Mary and Carrie's father was born in New York. And again, that's important information because now you know that Charles Ingalls birthplace was in New York. So that again gives you additional information you can use in subsequent searches. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and go back to my search screen again. And this time I want to go ahead and show you how you would use the browse functionality. Now actually the 1880 census is searchable now, but at the time I first was looking for this information, it wasn't searchable. And so I did use the browse feature to find the family in 1880. So I'm going to go ahead and show you how that works. So I click on browse. And the first thing the browse screen asks you to do is select a census year. So I selected 1880. As soon as you select a census year, you'll see a little map over to the left that shows you the configuration of the United States at that particular point in time. Next, you're asked to select a state. And if you can notice from the map, South Dakota and North Dakota are not yet states. So we're going to have to go in and look at Dakota territory. But I want to take a moment and show. This doesn't work for territories, but it does work for states. Once you select a state name, you actually get an option to view a map of the state as it appeared at the time. And I want to make sure that you realize what the advantage of viewing the map is. So I'm going to go ahead and pull off the map of Nebraska. And what you will notice is you've got county boundaries as they appear now, as well as county boundaries as they existed at the time. And you'll notice they are not the same. And so, for instance, if you had relatives who in the 1880s were living in what is present-day... Is that Sheridan County? I think it's Sheridan County. You would not want to look for Sheridan County in 1880. It was all considered Sioux County back then. So the county boundaries were different back then, and you have to search based on the boundaries as they existed at the time. Okay, so back to the Ingalls family in Dakota territory. Okay, now we have to select county. And I actually remember from that record that we found for Carolyn Ingalls in 1910, I remember that she was in Kingsbury County, so I select Kingsbury. Now this is the point at which browsing can get tedious. Under Location, you'll see I have all these township numbers and range numbers. If you don't know which township number or range number your ancestor lived in, that means you're going to have to browse through each one separately, and each one is going to contain multiple pages. So that is where you do have to have some patience. In this particular case, the Ingalls are listed on township 111, range 56. So I'm going to go ahead and jump right there. And if we scroll through, you'll see here is Charles P. Ingalls, 44. He's a farmer. You have Carolyn, his wife is 40. Her profession is keeping house. And then I always think this is kind of sweet. Mary and Laura are listed, and their profession is help in keeping house. And then you've got the two younger girls. Carolyn is nine, and Grace is three. And one additional piece of useful information you pick up here is that Grace was born in Iowa. And that is interesting because that doesn't factor in the books at all. I don't remember the family living in Iowa in any of the books, but I think that correlates to what people often find or sometimes find in their own families. They think they know where their family members lived at all periods of time, and sometimes they'll find people who were born in places that they never knew their family lived. So that's the kind of additional data that you can pick up from the census, which then helps you with future searches. Maybe you want to go look for birth records in Iowa in that case, and you never would have thought to do that otherwise. So that's the kind of information you can pick up. Okay. We are running out of time, and I do want to get to the other census files and show you a bit about how to search them. But before we do that, I want to go ahead, and I'm not going to walk through this step-by-step like I usually do, but I do want to show you a particular, I want to show you what can happen with the census. So we figured out that the Ingalls family was probably living in Kansas in 1870. If you do a search for Charles Ingalls in 1870 in Kansas, you are not going to find him. You can do a search for just plain old Ingalls, and you're not going to find him. Eventually, I did find him, and I had to do a search for 1870 Kansas, and I figured out that they were in Montgomery County, so I was able to type that in. And then the other piece of information I knew is that I knew that Charles Ingalls was born in New York, so I put that piece of information in. So I did my search, and I got 208 results. And again, in normal situations, 208 results is quite a few, but when you're scanning through one of these index pages, it's not that hard to look through. They're sorted alphabetically by surname, so we start scrolling through. And when we get to the eyes, we find someone listed. Ingalls, I-N-G-L-E-S-C-P, age 34, born in New York. And so if we go in and look at that record, you'll see C.P. Ingalls, his wife Carolyn, his daughter Mary, his daughter Laura. And this is one of those examples of where it's really important to go ahead and look at that next page of the census, especially if your family is at the very bottom of the census page, because you have to turn the page, and then you will see that grace, I'm sorry, Carolyn is listed on the next page, and she is two-twelfths of a year old at the time, so she's just about two months old. So that's an example where even though this census is searchable, you'd probably never guess how misspelled the name was, and searching by name is not useful. And so being able to sort of patch together other pieces of information you know about the family can actually help you find them. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and jump back quickly, and let's jump into books first. And you have several search options. There's a people search form, a places search form. You can browse the titles of all of the books that have been digitized. And if you click on the publications, there's actually going to be another link for an advanced publication search. I just want to point out the people and the places search forms are actually identical. Each contains a person name field, a place name field, and a keyword field. The only difference is that on the people search form, the person names search box appears first, and if we would go to the places search, the place names field would appear first. You'll get the exact same results if you perform a similar search or an identical search, but your results are sorted differently depending on whether you searched using people or places. The people search form puts more emphasis on when your results are sorted, more weight is given to occurrences of the person's name. If you use the place search form when your results are sorted, place names are weighted more heavily just in terms of how their results are arranged. If you type a name in the person names box, so I'm typing in George Norris, it is going to look for these two words within four words of each other in either order. So what that does is it lets you, you don't have to worry about whether to type the name in first name, last name, or last name, first name. If the name appears with the middle initial in the book, you'll still find it. So person name field looks for both words within four words of each other. I'm going to type in Nebraska and click on search and you get 297 results. They're sorted by relevancy and most weight is given to records that contain the name George Norris. If you click on the view image link, it's going to take you to the first page of the book and then you can scroll through page by page. If you click on view hits, it's going to take you to citation page that also tells you how many total hits. So this is 2525, excuse me. And you have a table of contents. You can click on a chapter or section title to go to the first page of that chapter. To the left of each chapter, you have a number indicating how many times your search terms appear in that chapter. And if you click on that number link, it will take you to the first page within that chapter that contains a hit. What you need to remember though is that we have a way of knowing which hit represents an occurrence of the word Nebraska and which hit represents an occurrence of George Norris. So if we're looking for references to George Norris, we're going to have to go through and look at every single hit. And as you can imagine, there are lots of occurrences of the word Nebraska in this book. So in that way, this search is a bit tedious. So I can go from hit to hit and just go through the pages and see if I find a reference to George Norris or a reference to Nebraska. So this is an example of the fact it's a powerful search. But sometimes you're not necessarily finding both of your search terms on the same page. It can be hundreds of pages apart in the book. So I'm going to go ahead and jump to the publications search option. And you have the browse option first. For example, I can click on N and it'll take me to the beginning of an alphabetical list of titles that begin with the letter N, which I don't think is particularly useful. I could type in Nebraska and I could go and see all titles that begin with the word Nebraska, but of course all books about Nebraska don't start with the word Nebraska. So again, that's not necessarily that useful. But what is useful and I wish that they made this an option to access on the main books search page is the search publications option. And this gives you more fields in which you can input information. And what I like is there's an actual subject field. So I can say I want to find books about Nebraska. So it's not going to consider every book that has a reference to Nebraska somewhere in the text. It's not going to retrieve it. It's only going to retrieve books that are specifically about Nebraska. And then up in keywords, I could type my name. So I could type George Norris. The only thing is this is not one of those people search boxes. So it doesn't automatically search for my words within four words of each other. So if I want to do something similar to that, I do have to tell it to do that. And you would do that by typing in near colon four. So now I'm searching for George Norris in books about Nebraska. And instead of 297 results, I get five results. And if I go and look at my hits, every hit is going to be a hit on George Norris. It's not going to be considering the word Nebraska a hit. So I actually think that search form is more useful than the others that are more prominently featured. So that's book searching. I'm moving on to Percy. This is the periodical index. And you have four different search forms. You can search for people's names, places, how-tos, and periodicals. And since we're running short of time, I'm just going to go ahead and go into the people search form. The thing to remember is that these are very brief citation records. There are no abstracts. They don't have subject headings assigned to them. So you're basically trying to match words that appear within that brief citation record. So if I'm looking for articles that appeared in genealogy local history periodicals that are about Laura Ingalls Wilder, I could type in Wilder under surname, and then under keyword Laura Ingalls, click on search, and it finds 28 records. And a lot of these are very, like I said, you know, not the kind of publications that you would be familiar with. If you're not living in that particular county, so like the Charleston County Historical Society Newsletter, those are the kind of publications you will get. Here's one that's more recognizable, Great Plains Quarterly. But this is how brief the records are. Laura Ingalls Wilder, architect of series, is the title. And you've got which volume and issue of the periodical it appeared in, that's it. You can request this through interlibrary loan, or I mentioned down here you do have a link to the request form. And this is just a PDF form that you can print out and fill out. And you can then submit it to the Ellen County Public Library. There's a small cost involved, which they outlined at the top. But they have all of these periodicals that their citations come from. So that is, if you have a patron who's wanting a lot of articles, this is a good place to point them to. It's quick, easy, it's really not too expensive. It's nice they offer that quick jump right to where you can get it from the particular place that owns these. Right. And a lot of other places, libraries will own these periodicals. And you can get it through standard mutual library loan, but sometimes it might be just as easy to go directly to Ellen County. That is an option. Do we need to end right at 11, Krista? No, we can go a few minutes over. Okay. I have a question that somebody typed in, but we'll do it after you go through these things. It's about promoting heritage. Okay, I'm going to try to wrap up in five minutes so we don't go too far over. But I want to at least show you what a record in each of these databases looks like. So here's the Friedman's Bank records. So I have done, I found a record on someone named, let's see, last name is Marshall. Given name is John. Bank location is Louisiana. So let me just pull up this particular record. And I think I want record number five. So John Marshall, Louisiana, 1872. You'll actually have a digitized image of the handwritten page. So you'll see this is a record for John and Charles Marshall on ages 10 and 12. It tells you where they were born and they were brought up in New Orleans. It gives you their address, complexion. This is what I was talking about. They have Y for yellow. And then I think this is neat under occupation scholar. So they were school boys. I think that's cute. They have information about the parents and brothers and some other information which is hard to read for me. Now, if you scroll down beneath the image, they do include transcripts, but they don't always include transcript. They don't always translate all the information or transcribe all the information. But I think this is interesting. In this particular case, it says not signed. This is a joint account between John Marshall and Charles Marshall. And then I like this. Money to be drawn only by the mothers, Suzanne Marshall. So she doesn't want to give her sons direct access to their funds. So that's an example of the type of record you'll find in the Freedmen's Bank files. Under Revolutionary War, I'm going to search on a woman named Myers. Anna from New York. And click on search. And I think I want the second one. And this is just a scanned image of the file folder that these records are stored in. And so you just page through them. And that could be anywhere from two or three documents within the file to, you know, 20 pages. It just depends. So this says that she's a widow and it talks about rank and service of her husband. And then you have the supporting documents that she has submitted to prove her relationship. And this actually looks like a page out of the family Bible. So you can see why a genealogist would like this. It's difficult to read, but if you're motivated, I bet you could figure it out. You've got names, births, marriages, and deaths and dates. So that's an example of white genealogists like these particular files. Finally, we'll go to the serial set. And I found a really interesting record here. If this was your ancestor, I think you would love to find this record. His name is Andrew Chu Yang. And these documents relate to efforts. I'm just going to go ahead and pull up the full record. His parent, he's in the process of being adopted or he has been adopted by two American citizens. But he says here the beneficiary of the bill is a 12-year-old native and citizen of China who was adopted in Taipei, Taiwan in September 22, 1967 by U.S. citizens. This beneficiary has continued to reside with his natural parents in Taiwan. The adoptive parents reside in Baton Rouge. But they actually go through and they list the names of the natural parents in China. And the place where they live. So again, if this was your relative and you were trying to track your family history, this is invaluable information. So again, it's just a real hodgepodge of information that you can find in the serial set. And the odds of finding your family members represented in one of these acts might be small, but it's certainly worth a shot to see. So that is what I have prepared for you. And Krista, you said there was a question. Linda Gardner at Hastings Public Library says they're doing a program on genealogy soon and they want to know if there are any bookmarks or other promotional materials they can get their hands on about Heritage Quest. Let me see. I'm trying to remember. I know we used to have documents or we had some files that you could print off. And when we changed Nebraska Access, we had to update our documents to match the new Nebraska Access. Let's go ahead. I'm going to go to links for librarians here on the Nebraska Library Commission homepage. And I'm looking for Nebraska Access Toolbox right here. And promotional materials. And I think at this point we might just have, we have a poster that talks about Heritage Quest online. So that's about all we have at this point. I think we used to have some... I know some of the database companies do their own Heritage Quest or anything for themselves on their own. Not that we have. So I guess the answer is we have a poster but we don't really have any bookmarks at this point. But you can definitely print that out and use that to promote your program that you're doing. Right. You can sure hand that out. It's got the URL that they need to get to it on their own. So that would be something for them. Any other questions? That's it right now. Anybody have any other questions? You want to toss out before we... To Susan? Everyone is still here, so. Do you have a final slide with your contact info? Or is that just the beginning? Yeah, I do have a final slide. So if you do print out the slides after the fact, I do have information on how to get some additional training materials that we have. And then I guess... This stuff here may be of use in your session too that you're doing at the Hastings Public. If you're going to be teaching about Heritage Quest, you could use some of this in your program. Right. Let me see if I can... Actually, let me go back to the Nebraska Access Toolbox, Backtrack, and Under Training. Here we go. These are online versions of handouts that we provide when we're doing training at the Database Roadshow. So there's Tips on Better Book Searching, which talks about some of those strategies for typing in near, colon, for, that sort of thing. Tips on Searching the Census is a handout that provides you with that sort of background information that I provided at the beginning, like, you know, you've got some... Census years are searchable, some orange, search for head of household. 1890 Census was destroyed by fire, that kind of information. So you might want to come back here and look at some of these documents as well. We've got samples, searches, and tips that you could take a look at, practice questions, and answers. So, you know, that might give you some ideas for, you know, things that people can do in class or examples that you can use for searching. Okay, it looks like nobody else has popped up with any new questions while we're talking about that. So I think we'll wrap up today's session. Very cool, very interesting information. Definitely useful, this session, for all the tips and things that somebody just jumping in hit first wouldn't have a clue. You just think, why can't I find anything? There's nothing in here, it's horrible, yeah. So the session was recorded and as Susan said, the PowerPoint will be up on our website and the recording will be available too if you need to refer to it later or if you have other people you know who might be able to... This might be useful for, if you can refer them to the recording. And I think everyone here is a Nebraska librarian. You guys know how to get a hold of me so you can always contact me directly also. Call Susan, do you have any questions as you're using it trying to figure it out? I will do my best. I will have got people saying thanks Susan for the session. So that will wrap it up for today's session. Next week, we hope to join us for next week's Encompass Live, which is a special edition of Encompass Live. It's called Get Out and Reach, Outreach Projects and Health Information. Here at the Library Commission we are hosting a session on an in-person session here and all day meeting about outreach projects and health information. But the morning panel discussion will be our Encompass Live for the day, for the week. So we have four people who are on the panel. We're going to be broadcasting that as Encompass Live. And because it is part of this in-person session here, it is at a special time. Encompass Live is usually at 10 a.m. Next week's will be at 9 a.m. Central Time, an hour earlier. So if you're interested in it, take a look at our website. But just remember it will be at 9 a.m. And it's actually for an hour and a half to not an hour next week. So take a look at that or any of our other future sessions. We've got things scheduled now all the way through to end of October even, I think. Wow. Lots of things out there to sign up for. Okay, so thank you very much. And we will hopefully see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye.