Finding Your Family

As I write today, the Statistics page tells me that there are 3745 individuals recorded in the logs here at Our Family. You're probably not interested in all of them, and you're certainly not interested in all of them at once. How do you find the people you want? Here are two easy ways:

Easiest and most straightforward, you can simply search for an individual. At left and also on the Our Family homepage, you'll see search fields. You can type a last name and/or a first name and then click "Search". The result: a list of everyone that matches those names. Note that you will get a longer list if you are less specific. For instance, searching for last name "Kelley" and first name "Cott" lists only one person, but searching for last name "Kelley" and first name "C" lists everyone with the last name "Kelley" that has a C anywhere in their first name.

To do more intricate searches, use one of the many Search (or sometimes Advanced Search) links. They'll take you to the search page, where you can probe with much more detail than just a name: dates, places, etc.

Some important details about searching:

• In genealogical work, all women go by their maiden names, so if you search for a married name, you probably won't find what you want!
• If you haven't logged in as a user, you won't see much information about living people. (To read more about this, see Logging in & Why.)
• The search fields are not case-sensitive, so searching for last name "Kelley" produces the same results as searching for last name "KeLLeY".

To look for whole, extended families at once, or to see which of your relatives are in the logs, you might want to browse surnames. Again, there's a link at left.