[or-roots] Maryland records link of interest.

[Leslie Chapman]

Okay first of all I should apologize for not explaining the link, the actual
search page(s) have horrendously long URL's that would frustrat anyone
trying to use them and not noticing the fact that the email process had
turned them into three or four lines, and even if you did and were as clumsy
as me you would still be frustrated trying to use them. The other thing I
neglected to consider is that this web site is primarily designed for the
benefit of people within the Maryland eduction and government community and
as such a signicant portion of the information is protected from public
access. I don't know if there is any way to gain access as a non Maryland
genealogist, one could email the web master and ask, but I get the
impression from what I have read that the answer would be no. That said
there is still a lot of information open to the public, it can just be a
little annoying to find what you "really want" isn't part of that.

What this link takes you to is the Archives home page;

http://archivesofmaryland.net/html/index.html

Not unlike the Oregon archives home page it contains a lot of relevant
information that most of us ignore unless we are forced to wade through it
looking for our partiular pearls.

On the left hand side of that page is a menu with things like
"constitutional records", "Judicial Records" ; "Land Records" and so on. The
logical assumption would be that a person would chose one of those links and
go from there. That however doesn't work for me.

At the upper right hand corner of the screen is a box with "search entire
site for" above it and a "GO" button next to it. Plug your surname of
interest in there and click "go"

That will probably get you more hits than you can conveniently wade through.
I tried Fitzhugh which considering they were mostly Virginians I thought
would get me a limited list and got 127 hits.

Now on the page that should bring up your first list of hits, under

Search the Maryland State Archives

at the top of the page; is a button for "advanced search" I would use that
button which takes you to a page with four options for possible ways to
enter your search terms and a whole raft of ways to tweak things. I
recommend leaving most of the options just as you find them and using the
four boxes to try and control my search, for example I tried Magruder and
got 240+ hits, but using "with the exact phrase" box I get zero hits,
plugging the same two words into "with all of the words" gets me one hit
which turns out to be typical of what I get when searching for people, an
index page with John Magruder and further up the page is Theophilus Kitton.
I think that should give you enough to go on, the only other thing I want to
call your attention to is the box just to the left of the search button
where you can narrow your search by limiting the parts of the archive you
wish to search. I don't usually find much of genealogical interest in the
proceedings of senates and congresses and town halls and so forth so I
usually use that option. For example I just did Magruder  and limited it to
Biography Files and got only 24 hits. Unfortunately the majority of them
fall into the category in the second part of my opening paragraph. Like a
biography that is probably one of Theophilus' cousins for example.

Hopefully this will make it easier for folks to actually get some useful
information out of; at least it will help me next time I go there if I can
remember that I wrote this email.

Les C