Some Choice Terms

 

It's the moment of truth: I'm using the FamilySearch Labs Full Text search to see if I can find any trace of what became of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis' potential father, William Laws. My hope is to easily find a will drawn up by William among the legal papers in the state of his last residence, Tennessee. 

The trick, apparently, is to choose my search terms wisely—date, place, record type, keywords. There is a reason for this. No—there are several reasons for this. Let me list the problem with the choices.

First is the obvious: looking for someone surnamed Laws in a collection of legal records may be difficult, if a good number of those records include the oft-use phrase, "according to the laws of...." So I thought of a preemptive strike: couple my search for William Laws with a keyword. I have two easy possibilities, each of them having to do with his penchant for selecting unusual names for his sons: the name Larkin, and the name Pine Dexter.

Well, Pine Dexter didn't help much. Apparently, there are several mentions in legal records in the state of Tennessee including the word pine. Why, I'm not sure, but the count of hits for this choice provided by the FamilySearch Labs search page was rather discouraging. And surprisingly, Larkin was a surname used enough times in Tennessee to hamper my search progress using the other keyword option. I have yet to try out the name of the third son—Wiley—but my gut tells me that name wouldn't serve me much better.

Pinpointing the location for a possible will for William also didn't help. I couldn't rely on his remaining in the same Tennessee county where I had found him for the 1870 census—Greene County—because I had already found him moving quite a bit for the enumerations I had traced him to in the past. However, it looks like it might be worth my while to return to the program to do a separate search for each county location.

It can make all the difference which search terms we use to find our ancestors. Even if we are using a tool as effective as the Full Text search, the approach sometimes requires us to experiment with the terms we use. Then, again, I have no way of knowing whether William stayed in the last Tennessee county where I found him, or backtracked through his previous locations during the prior decades in Tennessee—or, worse for my search, returned home to North Carolina where he had been born.

Then, too, it helps to use the online system when it is not displaying a warning that some features "may not be available" while the website operators are "making improvements" to the site. Perhaps, among other records, any details about William Laws simply weren't available during my late-night research sessions—one tacit way to put in a good word for the genealogical early birds among us.