The improvements don’t include better telescopes to look further back in time (or cool hats with big feathers to keep the sun out of your eyes).  But we did recently release some great new and enhanced search features on the GenGophers.com website.  No telescopes or hats in the mix, but the release included some nifty new technical search capabilities. If you’re interested in learning about the specific features that were added or improved, here are the kinds of enhancements that were included:

1. Fuzzy name matching that allows recognition of common name variants.  This helps solve the not-too-infrequent-issue of poor optical character recognition during the book scanning process.  For example, it would overcome the problem of “Williams” being incorrectly identified as “Villiams” during the OCR process.
2. Fuzzy name matching can be turned off with a new “exact only” checkbox.
3. Searches at the city and county level can now be performed, in addition to the current ability to search on states/provinces and countries.
4. Searching can be performed just on places so you can find all references to a particular place.
5. Improved accuracy when associating given names and surnames that should be linked together, a powerful search feature unique to Genealogy Gophers.
6. Searches for particular dates can now be performed, in addition to the current ability to search over date ranges.
7. An improved ability to associate both the dates and the places that should be connected to a specific person.  This would include, for example, being able to match a person with a place name that appears only in the book title.
8. Increased options when employing wildcard searches using the “?” and “*” characters.
9. The ability to now search for relatives from Ireland and Quebec (we have relatives from there and really needed this one).

We hope you find these new tools give you an even clearer look back into time. And with no telescopes required.

— Your friends at Genealogy Gophers