The most important tools a search instructor has are good examples. You treasure the ones that best illustrate the concepts you’re trying to get across to your students. At the same time, you’re always trying to cultivate new ones for future classes.

One of my favorites involves my dad. I use him whenever I discuss the Hidden Web, which is the term used to describe content that Google can’t index. My dad died in 1971, two decades before the Web was invented. A Google search for his name retrieves nothing about him. But it makes sense that he’s not in Google’s index, right? Wrong. There are at least 4 publicly-accessible databases containing info on my dad, one of which is the Ellis Island Records site. I often show students how much genealogical data I can acquire about him from just this one source.

Recently I realized that I had been focusing for years on the mechanics of finding that data, but had never seriously bothered to analyze it. His record (registration required) says that 16 year-old Domenico Giancaterino arrived in the U.S. from Penne, Italy on January 26, 1916. That was about a month before his 17th birthday, I think. (I never got a straight answer from anyone about how old he really was, so I’ll take the government’s word for it.) And that makes me wonder: did his family ship him over here to spare him from the Italian Front? I’ll never know for sure. The people who could have told me have all died. But this could be my own personal butterfly effect. If not for the First World War, Domenico might never have crossed the Atlantic in order to become Dominick. And where would that have left me?

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on November 11, 2009 - 8:48 am

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