My wife and I started a genealogy project years ago, but we never made much progress with it because the family records — marriages, births, deaths and so on — were so hard to track down. We went to the courthouse a lot at first, but after finding nothing we gave up in frustration.
If you have already tried to search public records, you know how tedious and time consuming it can be. But in this age of the Internet, a lot of these records are being stored online. Never before has searching public records been easier or more productive.
Before the Internet and public records going online, my genealogy would have taken forever. I would have to take trips to the courthouse or hall of records several times per week, and all the gas and parking that entails. I spent hours every night pulling records by hand, thumbing through papers until I found the one record I was looking for. Sometimes, I didn’t find anything at all.
But now thanks to the Internet, there are now millions of government and public records online and available for searching. For my genealogy project, I focused mostly on birth, death, and property records. But many of these online databases include many other types of records, including court records, taxes, and real estate.
Not only is searching online more convenient than going to the courthouse, it is easier too. You don’t need any special technical skills. Just type a name, address, or anything you want to search on into the search form, and the software does the rest.
Online searching is perfect for finding a lost relative, or finding our more information on just about any person, business, or piece of real estate. However, if you need ‘official’ documents you should contact the courthouse directly for a notarized copy. This seems like an inconvenience, but you can do all the preliminary research first, and then call for just the official records you need. You will save a huge amount of time and headache by searching online first, then calling the courthouse later. I suggest calling instead of emailing because the Broward County Public Records Office could decide to publish your email address, as a matter of ‘public record’!
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