Researching the Family Tree

by | May 23, 2025 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Are you setting out on your journey to find your family tree? If you live down the street or on the other side of the world, there are many resources to help you find your ancestors. Here are some of our favorite places to look. And, although our focus is on local history, anyone can use these.

Internet Search engines, or just “Google it.” Don’t overlook the simple tool of simply typing in your name and seeing what comes up. The search engines that power the internet are constantly crawling about content and updating. Hopefully the resources on the Old Mentz Heritage Center will come up first, but you might find posts on our old Blogger site, old columns from the Auburn Citizen, Dawn Roe’s excellent Port Byron History Corner, and so much more.

Google Books. Make a direct search in the Google Books search engine. Sometimes Google Books will pop up in your broader internet Google search, but not always. This is a overlooked resource. There are a lot of family histories out there, with a lot written in the end of the 1800s and early 1900s. These can be quite helpful, but unless they come with citations, they are basically hearsay. But use them for great hints. You might find court cases, journal mentions and so much more.

The Hafti Trust is another great digital book resource. In both of these, be creative in how you search. If you are looking for Phillip King in Port Byron, use quotes to make the system search for the phrase instead of the words. So “Phillip King” and Phillip King are two very different search terms. Use “Phillip King” AND “Port Byron.” The AND OR NOR commands are helpful but not always needed. But what about “Phillip King” AND Mentz, or “Phillip King” AND “Cayuga County,” or just King and Cayuga. Try all sorts of variations.

Old Mentz Digital Collection. This page on our website lists the many items we have made available over the years. We have links to our Advantage Archives search portal where we have newspapers, school newspapers, and the InPort Community newspaper. You will also find links to our collection of home movies on You Tube, the old Blogger pages, and other items we have scanned and made available in-house.

Seymour Library. The Seymour Library on Auburn, NY also uses an Advantage Archives search portal that allows you to search the Auburn, NY newspapers. We have also shared some of the Port Byron newspapers with them.

Old Fulton Postcards. This free site has over 57 million newspaper pages (as of May 2025) from all across the United States and Canada. If you are searching for your Port Byron family that moved to Michigan, you will likely find them here. As you might expect, it is a very busy site and at times, you might find the results very slow to load. This video from a few years ago explains how the site was created.

If you use Old Fulton, your results will be greatly aided by taking some time to learn how to use the search engine. In our May Genealogy Gatherings, Leanne presented her very clever search tips for Old Fulton. So here are some ideas to get you going. Her first great hint was to have two screens on your computer! It really helps. If you don’t have two screens, create two open windows. Open Old Fulton on one screen and a text document on the other.

Let’s move onto the Old Fulton site. The search screen is divided in two, with the search panel on the left and a welcome screen on the right. Grab the vertical divider and drag it across to make the search panel larger. Take note the search panel on the left. You will enter your search queries in the long white box. Just below that is another white box with the options of: Boolean, All the Words, Any of the Words, Exact Phrase. Click on Boolean and leave it there.

Another hint is to always open new pages by right clicking on the file name and opening in another window so you have multiple tabs open at once. (If you just left click on the link, it will open on the right side of the screen.)

 

Now go back to your text document and use that to write out your search queries. This does a couple things. First, it will allow you to track what terms you have searched and then make changes as needed. Second, once you have the search written out, copy and paste that into the search box. This is helpful because if Old Fulton doesn’t find any results, it will clear the box and you will need to reenter the search string again. NOTE – For the sake of clarity, I will put all the search terms into [brackets]. Don’t do this in actual searching!

So, let us search for the family named Tanner. Before, I said to choose the Boolean option, but let’s quickly see why. If you just type in the name [Tanner] and were to chose the All The Words option, your results will show every time the name Tanner, or the word tanner (as in tanning leather) was used. If you used the Any of the Words option, you would find every time either of, but not all all, the times those words appeared. So your results might show articles about the poems of Lord Byron next to a leather maker in Port Jacobs. You could try the Exact Phrase option to find all the articles about Port Byron, but that will return all the mentions of such as the Port Byron Chronicle, Port Byron schools, Port Byron Illinois, and so on. You will quickly find these three options tiresome.

Instead, let’s use the Boolean search function by giving it strings of words that will guide the results. The easiest of the Boolean searches is to use the w/ function, where the w/ means within a certain number of words. So we enter [Tanner w/10 “Port Byron”]. This has done a couple things. First, take note that the phrase “Port Byron” is in quotes. This turns the two words into one word. So instead of getting a return for every time the word Port and Byron is used, you will find only Port Byron. And, the w/10 tells the search engine to search for each time the word Tanner is used within 10 words of “Port Byron” And that number is up to you. If you are looking for Oliver Tanner, you could search for [“Oliver Tanner” w/10 “Port Byron”]. But men often used their middle names, so a search using, [Oliver w/3 Tanner], might bring up Oliver B Tanner. Another Boolean search is to use the AND, OR, AND NOT terms. For instance, a search of [“Oliver Tanner” AND “Port Byron”] will find each time “Oliver Tanner” was on the same page as “Port Byron.” This is very helpful for finding those little articles in a Michigan newspaper that notes that “Mrs. Oliver Tanner of Port Byron, NY was visiting her niece last week.” And you can use multiple terms in one search such as [Tanner w/20 “Port Byron” and drydock] that brings up 8 articles. Read through these articles to refine your searching. Does it mention Hull Tanner, a wife, mother or father? When you do a search, Old Fulton will look through all it 57 million pages and that can be very helpful to find those far away relatives, but if you want to narrow your search, you can tell the search engine to only search within certain files (the files being papers such as the Port Byron Chronicle or the Cato Citizen.) We know that Port Byron had a paper and we know that Old Fulton has that paper available. So using the text document, you write out, [Oliver Tanner and (filename contains (Port Byron or Auburn or Cato))]. If nothing comes back, make certain that you have used all the () to separate the terms. Okay, this brings back one article. But then you remember that Oliver often used the middle initial of B. And since you had a find, the search queries remained in the search box, so you can simply add a B to the string, but if you had to, you could go back to the text doc, add a B to the name, copy and paste into the search box. This brings back 28 articles to check. You could refine this by adding another filename command such as, [Oliver B Tanner and (filename contains (Port Byron or Auburn or Cato)) and (filename contains (1870~~1900))]. The 1870~~1900 (that is a tilde tilde) Now you are telling the search to only look at those papers between 1870 and 1900. And you find 17 articles.

Our last great hint from Leanne was how to flip through pages of the paper in case your article is continued on another page. As the files are scanned in chronological order, you just need to modify the page file. Sounds hard, but here is how to do it. First, click on the address bar and highlight the page address. Copy and paste this to your text document. So you do all that and you see: https://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%202/Auburn%20NY%20Argus/Auburn%20NY%20Argus%201891%20-%201894.pdf/Newspaper%20Auburn%20NY%20Argus%201891%20-%201894%20-%200878.PDF#xml=https://fultonhistory.com/dtSearch/dtisapi6.dll?cdm=getpdfhits&u=c593224&DocId=4432&Index=Z%3a%5cDISK%20F&HitCount=10&hits=11c7+11c8+11c9+1a00+1a03+1a06+1a07+1a0a+1a0d+1a0e+&SearchForm=%2fFulton%5fform%2ehtml&.pdf

Find the .PDF and delete everything after that. Now copy and paste this back into any search box so you have: https://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%202/Auburn%20NY%20Argus/Auburn%20NY%20Argus%201891%20-%201894.pdf/Newspaper%20Auburn%20NY%20Argus%201891%20-%201894%20-%200878.PDF

The last numbers in the string is the page number for the file. So if you change the 878 to 879, you will see the next page! Remember to keep using new windows so you can get back to the search page easily.

You will find many of, but not all, the Port Byron and Auburn newspapers on the Old Fulton site, so you might wonder why bother with the Old Mentz and Seymour sites? There are a couple reasons. The first is speed. You will find your returns are much faster as our sites has nowhere near the internet traffic that Old Fulton sees. You can also flip through the pages of the newspapers just by clicking on the arrows on the left and right of the page. This is very helpful when you find that article that says, “continued on page,” or if you have an idea of when something happened and want to scroll through the papers. However, you cannot use the Boolean search method on the Old Mentz or Seymour portals, Instead you are limited to All Of The Words and Exact Phrase. However, as the total pool of resources are confined to just the Port Byron and Auburn papers, it is not that limiting a factor. But, by using both and learning how to search will only improve your results.

Advantage Archives. This company has worked with many small organizations to digitize and make collections available. Check their website for a directory map to see what might be available near your relatives. Note- I find that the Community History Archive Directory works better for me in Firefox then Chrome.

NYS Historic Newspapers. This is another organization that has made newspapers available on the internet. Their search engine is a little different but you can search by county, dates, names and so on. There is also Newspapers.com. This is a subscriber service, but you can join by the month. I don’t find it as easy to search as Old Fulton, but others disagree with that. It is great to be able to search in far away places from your desktop, and think of the gas, hotel stay, food and such that you save by being able to search so easily.

The big fish in the genealogical ocean is Ancestry.com, and if you are serious about doing the work, it is worth the price. When you start your tree, hints will pop up to help guide you to possible records. We use Ancestry for our Port Byron Family Tree project, so if you are searching, make certain to look for that tree in your hints.

Family Search is another genealogical resource. You will need to create an account, but the tree and resources are free. Be sure to check out the Research WIKI page to help you find resources from across the globe, and find out if what you are seeking is available as digital files. Then check out the new (as of 2024) AI search tool that can read all the documents that have not been indexed. This opens up a brand new world of research.

Cayuga County NYGenWeb. It use to be part of the old Rootsweb family, but when that ended, a new collaboration was born. Our local GenWeb volunteers have created one of the best free genealogical websites on the internet.

Montezuma Family Project. Kathy Decker has put together a fantastic site that has  a list of Montezuma (and Mentz) surnames along with comprehensive family data. As the town of Montezuma was once a part of the town of Mentz, it is a good idea to check to see if your family is on this list. Kathy has also been working on a project to merge our Ancestry tree with her database. This is not available online, but please be sure to ask.

Port Byron Library. The library has a local history room that has books, yearbooks, directories, some files, and other local materials. They are also a Ancestry affiliate library and have a computer dedicated to genealogical research. You will need to visit, however, and they have regular hours.

Find A Grave, and Billion Graves. Both of these post cemetery information and have local volunteers that will search for a headstone and photograph it for you. There are hundreds of similar sites that will help you explore your family tree. There are sites like Cyndi’s List and Linkpendium that simply gather links and help direct you to those resources.

And of course, we are always here to help!