Daily Genealogist

Remember the days when websites were simple and had only a few pages? It was so easy to find what you were looking for. Websites today can be complex structures with hundreds or thousands of pages. Even if you do know where the information you are looking for is located, it often involves clicking through several pages to get there.

Fortunately, there are shortcuts around this process. Depending on the browser you use, they may be called bookmarks, favorites, or something else. You can subdivide your bookmarks into folders. For example, I have bookmark folders for news, maps, and vital records.

One of my favorite uses is to circumvent basic search pages on websites. I often want to use the more advanced search features when researching, and having to go to a home page, then a search page, then an advanced search page can take time (even longer if any of those pages is slow in loading). Using bookmarks allows me to jump right to the advanced search page.

Saving a bookmark is easy. Just navigate to the page you wish, then select from the bookmarks, favorites, or tools menu (depending on your browser). Choose to save the page (either in the main menu or into one of the folders). You can even save page to the menu bar of your browser.

I have direct links on my toolbar for Boston.com, Ancestry.com advanced search, FamilySearch.org advanced search, and my online email. Another tip is to change the name of the page when saving it to your menu bar (for example, instead of FamilySearch.org, I called it FHL). The Safari browser even displays images of the pages in the main window for you to browse through. Clicking on the image jumps you right to the page.

Using bookmarks/favorites is a great timesaver, and it allows you to skip over pages that you have no interest in viewing.