Reuben ELLIOTT b1867 (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 18:33 (4683 days ago) @ unknown

Hi, glad it helps. I've only been using this and t'other sites for just over a year. My best recommendation is to set your sights low when first researching. Don't enter too many fields particularly Parishes and specific dates. Only search surnames at first. Do tick the soundex box and always think how a name could have been mispelt or mistranscribed in the past and try and allow for it eg if use the % "wildcard" key, such as EL% instead of Elliot, it will give results for ALL names starting in EL.....from this you get an idea of those that may be "yours" so can be narrowed down for later further investigation. Re first names, maybe just enter R to give all possible spelling variations of Reuben, say. Also the resulting long list of results may suggest the most likely Parishes where your ancestors lived; are they all Severnsiders for example, as would befit those in say Alvington as I think I saw some of your possibles in the C17th ?.
Yes you may get a long list to trawl thro but at least you don't miss any possibles.

Basically in my experience it's an enjoyable search, learning as you go, pitting your mind against the demon compooter, so exciting when you find your prey !
The Advanced Search is great too for finding households of baptisms, say. Again this deserves trial and error to find how it works, eg you can input the least info (again, "less gives more" with a FH site search engine in my experience) such as a father's name, it will give all the Baptisms with that name involved. The results can be sorted by clicking on the top of each column, fir example in date order, so easing your search.
Good luck !