New gen.-oriented search engine

[smcarberry]

For the past week or so, I have trying out a search engine provided me by another Carberry descendant. It has the unique name of Mocavo, so you can easily reach it with a simple Google search, or use one of these links:

http://mocavo.com
http://www.mocavo.com

You can use quotation marks around a person's name in order to bring up results for people of that specific name (including the surname and personal names in reverse order, as found in lists) and then, further down the screen, results not so specific are shown. The only results that appear on Mocavo are those in websites oriented to genealogy, so there is less wading through current-day material, as is the case with Google.

Mocavo reaches into the text of digitized books such as those on www.archive.org in a way that Google does not. I know this because my search term carberry philadelphia brought up all the usual results plus a new one, in a book on Ticknors not related to me. The author of that Ticknor book had ordered research from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on the Ticknors of Philadelphia, who are mine. So now I have thorough research by local experts, for no cost at all. It turns out that there were second and third marriages that have blocked my progress into the pre-1850 history of my Ticknor line out of Surrey, England. I now know that Mary Wood who is named in a death notice as my great grandmother's grandmother was actually on her 3rd husband (Samuel Wood), after a first marriage to Peryer Ticknor, the English immigrant (a great name for researching). Even better, I learned my great grandmother's other grandfather was Samuel Hare from Ireland. It's all there in the family history of an unrelated Ticknor -- who would have guessed ? You can read it for yourself by using this simple search term: "samuel hare" philadelphia "Mrs. Carberry"

That's the good news on the functioning of Mocavo. Unfortunately, search results often appear in frames and you cannot click through to the site itself in order to explore its other webpages. I am also seeing Mocavo references to particular text in an Internet Archives digitized book and yet not reaching that particular reference when Mocavo takes me to the book, where I must then use the provided internal search engine to reach the referenced text. I have tried saving the reference, leaving Mocavo, and going directly to the online book on the www.archive.org site. That works sometimes but not consistently because Internet Archives has changed the way it displays one of its formats (the "read online" one for the internal book search engine now usually shows no result no matter what search word you use). When that happens,
I switch to the "full text" format which does reliably bring up the referenced text, unless OCR has resulted in an altered spelling. Nonetheless, there is a net gain in the overall ability to reach more text because Mocavo is so thorough.

I believe that Mocavo is continuing to extend its reach to other types of genealogy online resources. As of now, newspaper articles don't seem to be directly included, although you may catch an occasional one if it has been transcribed on a website such as the Brooklyn Information Page.

Try it out and see for yourself.

Sharon Carberry