Tips for searching Project 2 families

Irene came up with a few tips to help search for Project 2 soldiers and their families. This will be of special interest to those of you I've recently assigned to Project 2. Thanks, Irene!

Project 2 is a challenge, but it can help sharpen your research skills. The most difficult thing is making peace with having more No Finds on the grid, so just expect that will be the case with many of them. Here are a few tips:

- Be more lenient on ages - they tend to be less exact than for Project 1 soldiers.

- Be more diligent in looking for possible clues - relations on the same page, migration patterns, naming patterns, parents' birthplaces, relatives named on records like death certificates and WW draft reg cards, etc... 

- If you find a pretty good match for a person but they are indexed as white, don't assume it is not the person you are looking for. Be sure to double check the manuscript. Sometimes M (for mulatto) was mistaken for W (white). And sometimes they really were enumerated as white, so if all other information matches, you may still use the source but lower the quality code.

- You can narrow search results by race on the censuses. If you do this, you'll need to try all variations - black, mulatto, negro, colored. I only do this when I have someone with a very common name and my initial searches did not work.