Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Finding Bresee data in the Rootsweb Mailing List Archives

I have been lax in completing my "To-Do" list of online searches for the parents of Cornelia Bresee. The index of previous posts is here.

http://www.rootsweb.com/ recently made searching the online mailing list archives extremely easy (use the Archiver Search engine - all lists) - and before it was very hard (go to a specific list, pick a year, search by keyword, do it again until you're done)

The Rootsweb Mailing List Archiver Search engine is at http://archiver.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/search. In the "Advanced Search" tab, You can input:

1) words in the Body of the text (e.g., "bresee columbia"
2) words in the Subject line (e.g., if you only wanted subjects containing "Bresee")
3) The email address of the poster
4) a specific mailing list (e.g., NYCOLUMB-L, or BRESEE-L)
5) a specific date (e.g. Jun 2005, or 2005)

You can combine any of them with the others. It is really simple, and it works really well.

The results come in groups of 25 hits with the search box at the top of the results page, so you have to scroll down to see the results. The results list shows you the message title, part of the message, the link to the message, the date of the message and the email address of the message sender. You can click on any one of the hits to see the full message on the mailing list.

For my Bresee (and variants), I used only the Text key words in combinations like "bresee rensselaer" "bresee columbia" "brazee columbia" "bries rensselaer" etc. I did find my own messages that I posted on the Rootsweb message boards (Bresee, Bries, NY-Rensselaer and NY-Columbia) , and plenty of messages that have been posted over the years - I recognize many of the names from the message board posts I read earlier.

Unfortunately, none of the messages really help me in my search for the parents of Cornelia Bresee.

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