Dr. Stephen P. Morse has been interested in genealogy since he was a young boy. He's also the creator of the 8086 chip, the ancestor of today's Pentium processor. Without that little design, you wouldn't be reading this now. But Morse's creativity goes much further.
When the Ellis Island Database came online several years ago, with some 23 million records of immigrants entering through New York, Morse was one of the first to log on. He was soon frustrated by the inefficient search engine and knew he could do better. His tools for better searching have helped many researchers find their elusive ancestors. The rest is history.
His innovative tools for many databases and other aids are neatly cataloged at his One-Step site. Each time a new database is made accessible online, there seems to be a Morse aid to find things better and faster within that resource.
His pages have been very helpful in my own searching and I've found people who just didn't show up using any other technique.
Dr. Stephen P. Morse
Categories on his site include
Ellis Island (many forms, manifests, ship lists, NY passengers, directories, pictures NARA/FHL roll numbers)
Castle Garden (manifests, ship lists, browser, passengers)
Other Ports (passengers, manifests, ship lists for Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Hamburg, Canadian, Germans to America, Italians to America, Russians to America, etc.)
US Census (street finder, census codes, rolls, browser, descriptions counties, name searches, changed street names, soundex).
Canadian/UK Census
New York Census (Brooklyn 1925 name index, etc.)
Vital Records (birthdays, public records, addresses, ages, Social Security Death Records, Social Security Numbers, naturalization records, incarceration records, NY birth records, NY groom/bride index, death records, cemeteries, county indexes, Illinois, Montreal, etc.)
Calendar/Maps (Jewish calendar, Moslem calendar, French calendar, zip code maps, maps, latitude/longitude, area codes, country codes, etc.).
Foreign Alphabets (translation, transliteration, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Yiddish, soundex, cursive/print, foreign Googles, virtual keyboards, etc.)
Holocaust & Eastern Europe (variety of information)
Genetics (FamilyTreeDNA markers, haplogroups, charts, distances, migration, etc.)
Creating Search Applications
Miscellaneous (many other topics and innovations)
One of his newer helps are One-Step searches for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently made available passenger lists of Russian, German, Italian and Irish lists.
Each list is generally of immigrants who identified their nationality as Russian, German or Italian, and who landed in New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans or Philadelphia during the 19th century. The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies created the passenger list indexes; however, they are not complete listings of all these immigrants.
For some tips on how to search these, see the Family Tree Magazine article here.
Morse speaks at many genealogy conferences and meetings in North America; his speaking schedule is listed here. If he will be speaking in your area, try to attend his lecture.
He has written articles for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly ("Deep Linking & Deeper Linking," "Jewish Calendar Demystified"). He's received many awards including the 2008 Unified Polish Genealogical Societies Thank You Award, the 2007 Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly Excellence Award, the National Genealogical Society Award of Merit, and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (2003 Outstanding Contribution Award and 2006 Lifetime Achivement Award), while articles have been written about him in Heritage Quest Magazine, Genealogical Computing and elsewhere.
If you've used Morse's One-Step pages, I'd like to hear from you. I look forward to reading your comments.
