I’m now getting down to the nitty gritty.  My connections are in alphabetical order, and seem many are individuals that are lower on my research priorities.  That’s just bad luck and I won’t blame Mocavo for that.    I will however use one as an example for Google Vs Mocavo:

Let’s take two of my fellows. George Day, father and son of the same name.  They are probably my ancestors, but this is based mostly on published books, some of which had dubious citations, and I haven’t had the time to prove it all yet.

According to what I have is George Day I born 1640 Connecticut, Died 1684, Newark, NJ had a son named George Day 1668-1720 born and died in Newark N.J.  Mocavo brought up the following:

Three instances of the same manuscript collection at the NJ Historical Society, which includes some correspondence by a descendant of George Day, in the mid 1800’s.  It is on my “to-do” list but pretty far down, but fair enough it is a match.  There are two family trees, which is nice but I rarely use other people’s trees.  Mocavo delivers on what it states it will do; I’m just being picky.  When I search Google, George Day 1640 Newark the results are about 5 pages of family trees, a PDF file that looks interesting (saving for later), and mid-point on page, 5 a Newark “Gentlemen’s” club opened during the day.   Both results are different; Google seems to bring more in this case, Mocavo is all genealogy related though.

Privacy is a big issue these days.  We must be vigilant not to compromise data related to people that are still living.  I uploaded two gedcoms and marked one not to include the search.   The one family tree that I didn’t want to be searchable wasn’t even listed.  However the gedcom that I wanted to be viewable was a bit quirky. Although it is listed in family trees, when I click on it Mocavo brings me back to the listing of family trees, first page.  I’ve logged out and tried it, no luck getting details, yet other entries allow for me to view the individuals.  I will need to work on this to see what is going on.  For now I know all my data is secure.

A very nice feature is the email update.  Once a week I get an email letting me know new matches have been found.  This is nice for those of us that get busy doing other things; we now get a nudge that we should visit our matches.  Once a week is a good choice in my opinion, I am more apt to follow-up than if I am barraged daily.

I’ve also submitted my genealogy website to Mocavo and it appears to be working well.  I did a quick search on my one ancestor Emeline Church of Connecticut, a blog post from my website was on the top of the page, so it’s in the search path in less than a week.

Overall Mocavo appears to be a nice tool but still in it’s infancy.  I am not sure it is ready to replace Google at this time, but certainly can be used in conjunction with it.  I will be watching Mocavo over the next year and judging if it will be worthy of the subscription price.  I like the concept so I hope so!

The post Mocavo Plus, Part II appeared first on Once-Removed Genealogy Services.

There is a new research tool named Mocavo.  Mocavo is designed specifically for searching sites that are only genealogy related.   I have to ask myself, do I really need another search engine? I use Google for the most part, so why is Mocavo different than Google?  According to their website Google only contains about 5% of the genealogical content, and their search engine will net more results.  That is enough to get my attention.

I like to know a little bit about the company if I am going to do business with them.  I’m a bottom line type of gal so my first question, is how much is it?  There is a Free subscription, and a Mocavo Plus.  Plus is currently $119.40 for an annual subscription.  So what does Plus give me that the free version doesn’t?  More robust searches, wild card searches both of which could make a big difference in data collection. I haven’t yet tested their claims, but will do so before my next posting in this series.   In a recent news release the company has announced a chief operating officer, with a technical and Wall Street background and a chief genealogist.  This model makes sense for a company that wishes to attract investors as well as have a useful product.  I’d be a little nervous at some of the other subscription-based sites.

Okay now to try Mocavo.  There are several ways to search, but I started with uploading my gedcom file.  The website states it can take as much as an hour for the file to appear, and up to 24 hours before getting hits.  The instructions suggest uploading the file via drop-box, I tried both drop box and my hard drive and it worked fine either way.  My tree has about 800 individuals and it showed up quicker than an hour, also it took less than 24 hours to start getting results.  After loading the tree I went to My Connections, this is where you should see your individualized results.  I have 8 pages of results to go through (8 hours after initial upload).  On my first page there seems to be quite a bit on the Church family, circa 1500’s.  I will follow-up with the quality of these and other search results in my next posting.  The real question will be how close of a match are the results.  With surnames like Church and King internet searches can bring a lot of unnecessary data to weed out.

I’ve established I can search but what about privacy?  It’s a big concern of my mine as it is of many.  Always a big question on my mind, who owns my tree?  You may think that is a silly question, but it many cases when you upload your tree to a service; you relinquish that data as result.  According to Mocavo I retain ownership of my tree, I can mark it private or delete it any time.  That’s good to know. My second question is how are living people handled?  Trees marked as private there is no risk of exposure. Public trees, Mocavo will filter out individuals with a birth or death date after 1910.

Overall it looks like a nice idea.  I really have to test the quality of my search results, because like in every other situation not all evidence is created equally.

Stay Tuned!

Mocavo Web Site:

http://www.mocavo.com/

The post Mocavo Plus, a First Look appeared first on Once-Removed Genealogy Services.