Learn then do

I attended a RUSA conference in Seattle last week and learned from Anne Mitchell (Ancestry Anne) @f_f_stories  about different ways of searching in Ancestry.com for varied results. Came home to my library job and got a call this morning that gave me an opportunity for hands-on practice with that very thing! The patron was looking for an application for enrollment in the Five Civilized Tribes from 1896. A search of her ancestor by name yielded no results, but when I went through the collection THIS way: Search > Immigration & Travel > Citizenship & Naturalization Records > U.S. Native American Applications for Enrollment in Five Civilized Tribes, 1896 There it was! At first glance I only saw the index, which information the patron already had, but by choosing to "browse this collection" I could put in the parameters from the Index and arrived at the actual application documents. Turns out it was a DIFFERENT Thomas Giles, not her ancestor after all, but the search was productive in that it ruled OUT info and gave me new knowledge in search techniques.