What is the Difference between Searching and Researching?

Searching Is Looking

Anybody who’s ever gone onto Ancestry and typed in a name just to see what’s there, or clicked the hint leaves because they were curious, has done searching. A search is just looking.

There’s no set plan.  There’s no measurement for success. So you don’t know when you’ve reached the goal.  You don’t know if you have enough evidence.  You don’t know if what you have found is the thing you were looking for.

What it looks like in genealogy is hours in front of a computer screen or in books in a library.  You’re looking to see what you can see, that’s really it. It is the genealogy version of I Spy.  You know like ‘I spy with my little eye. Ooh, there’s census record.’ and ‘I spy with my little eye. Oh, that’s a land record.’

When you are searching, sure you can absolutely find things to connect to people.  That is why it becomes the gamified version of genealogy.  You search and find a record, confirm it matches right person, and then link it to your tree.  You get excited and you just got your dopamine hit.  It’s addictive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We’ve all done it, every one of us.  I’ve done it many, many times. You just want to see what’s out there. When an ancestor has 20 hints leave on their name, it  makes me think… ‘Ooh, what did they find?  Did somebody upload pictures? Ooh, yay!’  Seriously, that’s the fun part. All right, we all do it, but that isn’t actually researching.

Research Requires a Plan

Researching is when you define the question, what it is you want to know, and then create a plan saying how you’re going to go about answering that question.  This allows you to define your success.  In other words, this you can actually measure if we have accomplished the thing we decided to do.

Researching Starts With a Question

When we start researching we need to start with a goal in mind.  To do this we start with a question.  But where do we find the question we want to ask. 

First, we start with what we know.  Look at your pedigree chart and family group records. Find the blank spaces, those spaces will give you the question.  As you look at the blank spaces ask yourself, ‘What do I know?  And what do I want to know?’  Now take the answer to the question What do I want to know and frame it as a question.  For example, if the answer is ‘I don’t know where my grand father died’, then the question would be ‘Where did my grandfather die?’ 

Research Makes a Plan

Once you’ve got the question, then you decide what records you think might answer it.  Or what possible records could possibly lead me in that direction?  Now will you know every record that’s available?  Of course not.  Remember we always start with what we know, that goes for records too.  Eventually you will learn about more types of records, but in the beginning start with the records you do know.

If, eventually, you have exhausted all the resources you know of and you still don’t have an answer, you will need to create a plan to find out what other resources are available.  But that’s a whole other article. 

For now, create your plan, and work through those records in your plan. 

Searching Helps You Discover. Research Helps You Answer Questions.

Remember, both searching and researching are valuable tools.  However, each has a different use in your genealogy journey. 

Searching helps you discover things you might never have thought to look for on your own.  It also allows you to relax a little and not be so serious about your genealogy for a time.

Best way to look at this is searching is not directed.  It doesn’t have a plan.  It is just fun.  Now I’m not saying genealogy isn’t fun.  It most definitely is, in my opinion.  However, searching is when you are hoping that you find something to connect or collect.  And that’s okay.

Research, however, helps you answer questions.  It is the deliberate search for specific information.  It is when you actually make a plan and then  you work the plan.  Finally, you analyze your findings and decide what you are going to do next.  This is how you find out if you actually accomplished your goal.

That is when you come full circle on the Research Compass, and we start again.

I have used both hundreds of times in my own genealogy journey, and chances are you will too.