Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Dave Obee - Canada's Genealogist

I first met Dave Obee of Victoria in 2007 at a genealogy/library conference at the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. His website is at http://www.daveobee.com/

Since then, we had the occasion to meet each other in various events, and at the 2011 conference of the Ontario Genealogical Society held in Hamilton, I asked him to write a piece on Social Media for the August issue of Families.

As a lead-up to reading the paper in the fall issue of Families, there is a good article called "Database search strategies” at http://www.daveobee.com/columns/09search.htm in which he gives us ten reasons why a search may not be as straightforward as we may think they would be - as Dave says “There are dozens of reasons why a search might fail”.

Some of the reasons he gives are -

Original records were poorly written,

Places were confused, and

People lied - Some people do not want to be found.

But he gives eight ways to search to increase your chances of success, including the use of wildcards, and how to be flexible in searching.

Dave will be speaking at the 2012 Ontario Genealogical Society Conference to be held at Kingston, June 1-3, 2012. The website is http://www.ogs.on.ca/seminar/conference2012.php