Do you ever have a genealogy research question that requires
you to analyze a large number of families in order to find
and answer or draw some conclusions? In this video,
we're going to teach you how to mine some websites in order to
combine that information so you can make discoveries. Howdy,
I'm Devon Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics where we help
you understand your DNA, climb your family tree, and write
your ancestors stories along the way. Good genealogy begins
with a research question and the three basic forms of
research questions are event, relationship, and biographical
but sometimes our research questions are just a little bit
more complicated. Today, we're going to talk the case of John
Long from Lawrence Clearfield County Pennsylvania and in 1850
his household looks like this so he has himself his wife a
son and a Martha Welch but there's a couple of problems
number one I don't know who Martha Welch is and number two
he has a son William Lester Long who is about one or two
years old and not in this list. So, what I want to do is mine
data mine the 1850 census to see if I can find some other
Welch individuals listed in the county or if there are other
longs and maybe find my missing William. To do that, we need to
get the data mine extension on our Chrome browser. If you
don't have the data mining extension on your Chrome
browser, then check the link in the description for a video
that will show you how to that. Now, once I have the data
mining extension in my Chrome browser, I can click on that to
open up the tool and now, I'm going to create a new recipe.
Now, we can put the recipe on the right or the left. For now,
I'm going to leave it on the right and I'm going to increase
the size of the Lawrence Clearfield Pennsylvania 1850
census record here on family search and I'm going to bring
up this index up here so we can see what we're working with.
So, the first thing I need to do is decide if I'm working
with a list or a detail page and this is a list as you can
see So then I'm going to click on row. Find row and I'm going
to come hover my mouse over John lung and I'm going to let
go of the mouse and hit the shift key. It's really took me
a while to figure that out. So let go of the mouse and just
hit the shift key. Now I need to try to highlight this row
and to do that I'm going to click on these different
options until the row is highlighted. If I can't get the
row to highlight, then I click this select parent icon. Click
on that and then now I've got this row highlighted. Scroll
down and click confirm and I'm ready for the next step. Now,
I'm going to columns. So the first column of data I want is
the name. So I type in name and then find hover over John again
and click the shift button. Once again I'm going to click
on these options and if they don't work then I'm going to
click this arrow button and I'm going to keep clicking this
arrow button until the field of is highlighted. That looks
good. So I'm going to click confirm. So I'm going to repeat
that process for the other columns I want to add to this
report. So I'm going to start a time loop so that you can see
this sped up a little bit and I'll see you when I'm finished.
So, now that I have all of those columns in place, I have
the household number, the age of the person, the place they
were born, and their name. I'm ready to go to the next step
and get this information scraped from family search. I'm
going to go find the navigation element, the part of the page
that advances to the next page. So, I'm going to click this
little slider button right here and that is what moves the data
my from the left side of the screen to the right side of the
screen so now I'm going to click on navigation and this is
the navigation button for family search if you could see
it right there well I'm going to click find and go press the
shift button and that is highlighted and then this is
the code we could turn on and off the different parts and you
could see the blue moving around and now this is the
right one and we're going to click confirm to sure that the
page actually advances, we're going to test the navigation.
So, paying attention to this number right here. If this
works, it should become number two. So, we test the navigation
and now we're on page two. Test it again and it goes to page
three. Now, make sure you go back to page one so that you
can run the data mining. So now, we're going to save our
recipe. Just give it an 1850 US census family search just helps
me know what I did and press save now we're going to press
run recipe so it opens our data mining screen and you can see
some crazy information but then I see John that didn't have an
age his birthplace and his house number right there and I
have it for all of those name that were on Family Search.
What's really great is not only can we get the information from
this page but all twenty-eight. So, how am I going to do that?
Well, then I click on next page and it says start page nation.
Before we click that button, we're going to tell family
search how many pages we want it to advance. It already did
one. Now, we want to advance 27 more pages. It was 28 over here
on Family Search. So, we want it to 27 more pages. Now, for
the purposes of this video, I'm just going to do three more
pages and what you can see in the background is it advancing
the pages as it goes through. So, it just advance to page
number four as it's scraping each page. So, once it's
finished, click close and then you're going to download.
You're going to download in a CSV file and it's okay if you
don't know what that is. Click on a CSV file and save it to
your computer and I'm going to give it this title 1850 long
question now what's really great about a CSV file is that
you can open up that CSV file in Microsoft Office Apple pages
as well as open office I used open office so I'm going to
right click open and this automatically goes to open
office. That's the program I use and here it's all of this
information. I'm going to copy and paste that into Google
Sheets because that's my preferred spreadsheet to work
in. Now that I have the information into Google Sheets.
I'm going to show you a couple of things that I do with Google
to enhance my project. So the first thing I'm going to do is
I'm going to bold this top row and I'm going to freeze it.
Then I'm going to put a data filter on it. I'm going to
highlight the columns I want the filter to go on and create
filter. What that allows me to do is all that this information
is the same but I can sort things. So I want to make sure
I get out all of the house number events like that right
there. And I can delete those rows and then I can sort by
house number again. The other thing I can do is I can drag
columns around. I actually like the house number over there.
The next thing I can do with data mining is I can color code
the household. So I can get household 214 and give it a
color. I'm going to choose a color yellow. Then I'm going to
look for each of the households that change number. So I know
214 is one household. 216 is a household and I'm going to
color code all the way down. I already did that here on this
tech table sheet. There you go. That's sheet. And what's really
cool when you can look at a lot of information this way and is
that I found there were 30 children under the age of 17
who were not in the household with the same surname. So you
see Martha Welch here and up there is John and John does not
have the same name as Martha Welch. I saw 30 children under
at the age of 17 where that happens. As a historian, I keep
thinking, wow, is this really common for Lawrence that
there's so many orphan children or guardian children in these
homes? Is it common for this area to farm out their
children? What's really historically going on in 1850
in Lawrence County? Just how common or uncommon is this?
Now, going back to genealogy, then, my brain thinks, oh my
gosh, when I go to 1840, when the names of the households
aren't listed, am I reading those households accurately?
How many of the children's that are marked with just a little
one or sometimes two or three in a column are really some of
these children that have different names and aren't
really related as clearly to the household head. But I doubt
it Chris. Let's go back. So, the next thing I'm going to
want to do in my spreadsheet to again, get back to that
question of who is Martha Welch and where's William Long? So,
what I can do is I can filter in the name field to just
everyone with the last name Welch. Let me do that. So,
first hit clear and then type the last name Welch and you
notice all of these Welch names are coming up. Now, you might
also have to include spelling variations but we're just
going to go ahead and click on everybody with the last name
Welch. So, now, I'm at the ends, my last Welch and I'm
going to click okay and now, we're filtering to just the
people in Lawrence, Pennsylvania with the last name
Welch and right off the back, I see two names. I see Martha
Welch not in the house of other other Welch's. I see household
two two two that strange atrophe apostrophe with the
extra letters that means it was a poor read on Family Search
we're not exactly sure what it was it could be Oscar it could
be Edgar if anybody wants to go look on page two of Lawrence
Clareford County Pennsylvania and try to figure it out a lot
of us have tried and we keep failing but I digress but
notice we have another Welch child who's not in a Welch
household. We have a Welch who is forty-three from
Pennsylvania and another Welch who's 70 from Ireland and you
start to wonder how are these families related? Could it be
possible that this family right here is related to this family
right here but why are these two children in homes that are
not their homes? That is what's really great with this data
money. Sure, you could browse through this pages but
sometimes in a spreadsheet when you see it this way things
start to make sense so now we're going to go ahead and
we're going to look for long remember we're missing William
Lester long repeat the process type in long find all the longs
and put check marks off it and then click okay so well this is
interesting we have John Long we have Hannah Long we have
Winfield Scott Long and we have a WM which often stands for
William L Long in a different household number to to chew.
That sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? So, what I'm
going to do is I'm going to do and get everybody back up. You
have to select all to get everybody back up and then I'm
going to filter the household to just clear all of those. I
want 21 4 and 2 2 2. Click on that and then let's see what's
going on. So, I have a John Hannah Winfield and what Martha
Welch and then I have this read family with a number of
children that are not reeds. We have a Mullin, a Long, or Welch
and this older gentleman with the name Love. Now you know
what's great about genealogy? Sometimes you can find your
missing people and sometimes you wind up with more questions
and answers. And so now I have the question who are the reeds
and why is William Long in the census record over with the
reeds and not with his parents the longs. And why are they do
they have Martha Welch in their household and Martha has a
10-year-old Welch in the household where William Long is
your head hurting yet I know mine is so I know this video
was a little bit long and probably a little bit confusing
but if you have any questions be sure to leave them in the
comment section below and also check out the descriptions
because that's where I will have links to other training on
how to do the data mining tool and get it for you if you are
ready for more tips on how to become a better genealogist
check here and for our latest video check here.