A website that should be on every genealogist’s list of bookmarks is Steve Morse’s One-Step Webpages (you can find it at www.stevemorse.org – not to be confused with stevemorse.com, which is the site of rock guitarist Steve Morse). This website has been a great help over my genealogical career and my library career as well. I know it can be a great help for all of you, too.
The One Step Webpages are a list of search engines and apps that are indispensable when doing genealogy research. And they’re free! Well, it’s free to use Morse’s search engine, but if you want to search Ancestry for immigration or census records, you’ll need to have an Ancestry subscription.
Other search engines on the page will scour immigration records from New York (both Ellis Island and Castle Garden), Baltimore, Boston, Galveston New Orleans and other ports for immigration records. Every U.S. Census can be searched as well as New York City vital records indexes from various sources.
Morse himself has had an interesting life. Prior to his genealogical endeavors he worked for Intel, where he became known as the “Father of the 8086 chip,” the processor that helped to power the personal computer revolution. Morse later turned his incredible programming skills to creating his One-Step Webpages and is already looking towards the release of the 1950 U.S. Census next year. He is also a popular speaker for genealogy clubs and conferences.
Indeed, Morse and his programming partner Joel Weintraub, have already added the Enumeration Districts for the 1950 Census in his Unified Census ED Finder. Here’s how it works:
When the 1950 Census is released next year, there won’t immediately be an index for it. But if you know where your relatives lived, you can enter the state, county, town, address and street name where they lived. From drop down menus, you can choose cross and back streets and you’ll get an enumeration district as a result. When the Census is made public, you can just go to that enumeration district to find your family, instead of looking through pages and pages of scans for an entire city.
A great many of the apps on the page are aids in researching Jewish genealogy: Hebrew and Yiddish translations, Jewish calendar conversions (Muslim and Julian also!), name transliterators (changing names between English and other alphabets, like Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Chinese and Japanese). There are also search engines for victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp and records for Dachau. There’s lots to play with, too. One of my favorites is the Relationship Calculator where you can input a chain of relationships between people to find out how you are related. For example, my mother’s mother’s sister’s son’s daughter is my second cousin.
I mean, really, there’s so much more I can tell you about, but it would just be easier to print a picture of the webpage and then run the following two words as my column: GO HERE. So, go there and check it out for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.
Danny Klein is a librarian at the Jersey City Free Public Library’s New Jersey Room and a founding member of the Hudson County Genealogical and Historical Society. He can be reached at hudsongenealogy@gmail.com or @HudsonGenealogy on Twitter.
Ad Choices