Steve Morses's One Step Webpage--Obamacare Data (No Joke) and SSDI

These articles are both taken from Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter at Click here for Obamacare Database and Easy Way to Search the SSDI

Viewing ObamaCare Plans in One Step

Steve Morse is well-known for his "One-Step Webpages," a genealogy web site at http://www.stevemorse.org that indexes large databases, including immigration records, census records, vital records, calendars, maps, foreign alphabets, and numerous other applications. Steve's web site helps simplify genealogy searches, reducing confusion and making information easier to find.

Now Steve has added another "One Step" index, simplifying an even more difficult, even mystifying, web site. It is called the Obamacare Plans in One Step.

No, this is not a joke. Take a look for yourself at http://stevemorse.org/obamacare/obamacare.html. I bet this will become a very popular online tool!

Posted by Dick Eastman on October 23, 2013 in Online Sites | Permalink

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The Easy (and More Accurate) Method of Searching the SSDI

The Social Security Death Index is a great research tool for finding relatives who died sometime after the early 1960s.

The SSDI is an index to the Death Master File (DMF) maintained by the Social Security Administration (SSA), which contains roughly 100 million records and is updated weekly. The file is created from internal SSA records of deceased persons possessing social security numbers and whose deaths were reported to the SSA.

The information within the SSDI is in the public domain and thereby available to everyone. However, in recent years a number of well-meaning but misguided public officials have attempted to close or at least restrict public access to the SSDI in the name of "preventing identity theft." Apparently, these officials do not realize that public access to the SSDI is one of the best tools for PREVENTING identity theft! (See my earlier article about the theft protection value of the SSDI at http://goo.gl/zthmCx.)

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Steve Morse is well known for the software tools he creates to simplify the searching of many online genealogy databases. Sometimes I think that Steve Morse is God's gift to genealogists. He takes good databases and turns them into great ones. Steve has created excellent indexing tools to the Ellis Island and Castle Garden sites as well as many other databases of interest to genealogists. His search tools generally will perform faster searches with more accurate results than the search capabilities invented by the original database designers.

Steve doesn't add any new data. He simply improves the search mechanisms and makes the search software available on his own site, called the "One-Step Portal." If you'd like to try Stephen Morse's One-Step Search Portal, go to http://www.stevemorse.org. I suspect you will be impressed by all the searches available there.

Steve Morse saw the weaknesses in the various offerings of the SSDI, so he created his own index at http://www.stevemorse.org/ssdi/ssdi.html. As you can see from the screenshot below, Steve offers more search options than any of the other online sites that offer the SSDI.

Click on the above thumbnail image to view a larger image of Steve's search parameters.

Steve's search engine will search the SSDI records found on the following websites:

worldvitalrecords.com
ancestry.com
familysearch.org
familytreelegends.com
genealogybank.com
NEHGS' americanancesters.org

However, Steve Morse's One-Stop web site only searches those sites one at a time. If you want to search ALL of those sites, you need to perform six separate searches, one for each online service.

Keep in mind that some of these services may restrict the information to paid members of the site. For instance, World Vital Records will only display results to paid subscribers. Ancestry.com will provide limited information to non-subscribers; but, to view the entire record, you need to sign on to Ancestry.com with a user name and password. Other online sites may or may not restrict access in some manner.

Steve Morse's One-Step Genealogy web site is always available free of charge, but the records it points to may be limited by the policies of the external site that controls those records.

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Use of Stephen Morse's One-Step Search Portal simplifies the searches as well as adds powerful search options that may not be available on all web sites' copies of the SSDI data. If you want to find the death information of someone who died in the U.S. in the early 1960s or later, go to http://www.stevemorse.org/ssdi/ssdi.html.