More and more records are being indexed, which is wonderful. But many are misindexed either because of poor handwriting or fading of originals or just poor indexing (often due to unfamiliarity with ethnic names by those indexing), which means that you might not find records that could be critical to your research. Even if everything is indexed correctly, if your family has a common surname, it might be difficult to find your Cohen among all of the Cohen records you'll get with a typical search.
In addition, not all fields are always indexed in some record sets, so there may be mention of your relatives in records that a simple search wouldn't find. So how do you improve your chances of finding these records? Especially if your family members are from smaller towns and villages, searching only by town can be critical. I'll give examples of how to do this on Ancestry, but you can do similar searches in most of the other large record repositories.
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| Edmund David Lebovitsch WWII Draft Registration |
