Steve Morse: Always improving

It's hard to keep up with Steve Morse and his One-Step website.

He's continually adding new utilities and tools, or updating and improving existing pages. There's so much here that a newcomer could get a bit lost. However, Steve has now made his site easier to use for all of us.

To avoid scrolling through the entire site, just look at the upper left corner menu of the site. Float your mouse over a category and see a drop-down menu of all pages in that category. Then just click on the item you need.

There's a new section on Genetic Genealogy and DNA, one of the fastest-growing segments of our field today. There are six DNA-related tools in this section, and you can check your page at Family Tree DNA, learn about haplogroups, build a DNA-group chart in one step, learn about migration details and see a nice migration map for each haplogroup.

For those checking for Soviet soldiers who died in World War II, Steve has added an English language front-end utility to an all-Russian database.

Those who are linguistically-challenged in Cyrillic couldn't read the directions, use the search engine or read the results (even if they got through the first two sections!). Steve has now provided help for all of this with his new utility, which offers transliteration of the results (not all fields are transliterated) into Latin characters.

While using the Russian form directly - if you can - limits the number of hits/page to 30, you can get 100 or more using Steve's form.

When I searched for my TALALAY family using Steve's form, I obtained 107 results including a large number of individuals previously unknown but probably related, as well as many from the non-Jewish branch. I recognized patrynomics of many relatives, but not the sons of those individuals, so this was a good source of new information. There were some 50 BANK entries as well, including some patrynomics I recognized.

Find this handy-dandy item in two sections: "Foreign Alphabets" and "Holocaust and Eastern Europe."

I also checked the utility for "Searching the Polish index of the Repressed" and found eight results for my grandfather's FINK family, with known given names and patrynomics.

Steve is always ready to assist users of his site who may have questions or comments. Contact him through the One-Step website; just click on his name at the top of the page.