Mocavo approached me and asked me to do a review in return for a free subscription to their “plus” website and I readily agreed. I’ve been wanting to give it a try and this was my chance!
Mocavo is the world’s first and largest genealogy search engine. Google is great and serves its purpose, but it often gives too many search results, many of them not relevant to family history. Sometimes it’s hard to wade through all of them and find the ones that actually pertain to your ancestor – I can attest to that.
Let’s see how it performs by doing a couple of searches. With the free edition of Mocavo, you are able to do basic searches, but the plus version has an advanced search panel with names and dates. I will be using the advanced search.
I chose one of my husband’s ancestors, Joseph David Hollingsworth to start out with. I entered his full name and his birth and death years.
I only got 2 results. I decided that maybe I was making my search too narrow with the years and pulled them out for the next search.
This search gave me many more results and the majority of them were the person I was looking for.
There is a little button you can push at the end of each result, stating whether the person is the one you’re looking for, maybe a good match, or not who you’re looking for.
Even though I had 25 results, many of them were in fact, written by me. That’s a problem that I usually come across when I use Google also.
Mocavo has a great little box on the side of the page, where you can exclude all results from a certain source (you can enter in a number of different ones). I excluded my blog address and came up with much better search results. I love my blog, but my own posts aren’t going to help me in my research. 🙂
Besides doing a number of searches on different ancestors, I also uploaded a tree to the website.
Now, I get emails when new results have been found. Here is one I received about my Brittain ancestors:
Another thing that I wanted to check is whether I had control over the trees that I uploaded. I deleted the tree just to make sure that it was possible to do so. It worked. I’m glad to know that, because we all make mistakes and sometimes include things in our gedcoms that we don’t want to share with the entire world. 🙂
So, after about three weeks of use, I’m very happy with Mocavo. It is a definite addition to my arsenal of genealogy tools.
