Mocavo.com: New, free genealogy search engine launches

Claiming to be the world's largest free genealogy search engine, Mocavo.com launched today.

The tag line reads, "Searching billions of names in tens of thousands of free sources."

The world’s largest free genealogy search engine, says Mocavo.com, provides genealogists access to the best free genealogy content on the web including billions of names, dates and places worldwide.

The site seeks to index and make searchable all of the world’s free genealogy information.

According to the website, Mocavo.com discovers new sites every day. Sites currently searchable include genealogy message boards, family trees, state and local historical societies. Some of the well-known sites that Mocavo accesses include the Library of Congress, National Archives, Ellis Island, Find A Grave, the Internet Archive, various U.S. state archives, and large numbers of genealogy sites built by individuals for their own family history.

Mocavo links directly to the original content sites.

Dick Eastman and Randy Seaver have already posted about their experiences. Tracing the Tribe is contributing to the Jewish experience on the new site.

I usually start with my names of interest, TALALAY and DARDASHTI, moving onto the geographical locations important to this research, as well as other topics of interest. The website claims to enable the search of more than 50 billion words, so there must be something for Tracing the Tribe, right?

• There were 168 results for TALALAY and 1,757 entries for DARDASHTI.

The TALALAY entries included Ancestry board posts, conference entries and more. This search did offer a few new ones that I need to follow up on, and it saved me from what usually happens on a Google search, which produces thousands of references to cousins producer Rachel Talalay and her films, Dr. Paul Talalay (Rachel's father), the latex rubber Talalay process and broccoli sprouts.

The DARDASHTI entries included many for Tracing the Tribe, of course, but the others included many conference entries.

• My first geographical location -Mogilev, Belarus - displayed more than 1,550 hits, mostly from JewishGen's various pages, but aso including other sites. Some results need to be investigated more thoroughly.
• A search for "sephardic" - important for many Tracing the Tribe readers - produced more than 7,000 results, mostly from JewishGen. "Jewish Sephardic" brought out some 1,100. There were differences in the results.
• A search for "Tracing the Tribe," brought in some 71 hits, while "Jewish genealogy" resulted in nearly 20,000 results, covering a wide gamut of resources (JewishGen, Jewish genealogical societies, various archives, libraries, book lists, individual family history pages and much more).
• Searching merely for "Jewish," produced nearly 680,000 results. Among these were state history sites, message boards, state sites for Jewish archives, museums, JGSs, local history sites, cemeteries and many more.

Tracing the Tribe suggests you try it for your own "dot on the map" and surnames. Many more sites will likely be added and searches will produce many more results.

Mocavo.com also has a Facebook page, which Tracing the Tribe has "liked." I think you'll also like it.

Try it out and let your fellow readers know what you've found in your own search.