I keep obsessively hoping to find a death notice for Jane (Blakely) Stickle. Instead, I found one for her father Erastus Blakely Sr. Finding this was not as straightforward as it should have been. It did not turn up in a search for Blakely. Instead, I experimented with alternate spellings for Blakely. For this search I used Blackley. Notice that in the newspaper the spelling is Blakely NOT Blackley. So why did this turn up in a search for Blackley and not Blakley?? This is one of the many mysteries of search engines. In this case, the database was indexed by a computer, not a human. The computer basically interprets shapes or blobs of black on white. For some reason, the computer interpreted Blakely as Blackley. This gives me hope that more information will turn up. It also makes me fear that information will stay lost in plain sight. In any event, this is a lesson for me to apply to my genealogy research.
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