Using The Web To Research Your Finds

If there's any reason we shell out the scratch for a quality metal detector is the feeling we get when we unearth something old. Yeah, it's nice to see the ol' coffee can fill up with clads as the hunting season goes by, but it doesn't hold a candle to seeing a Civil War buckle, a large cent or old token sitting in the bottom of the hole. Jacques-Yves Cousteau probably felt pretty much the same way when he was trying to decide whether chronicling life under the seven seas or working for the state counting the number of largemouth bass in Lake Okeechobee would be a more satisfying career move.

Consequently, digging up stuff that was moldering in the ground even when our grandparents were in kindergarten often leaves us standing there holding some object and wondering, "Okay, what in blazes is this?" Identifying U.S. coins and some tokens and relics is often easy enough, since there are plenty of illustrated books to be found on those. But what about the other stuff?

Some of us might take it home, scan it and post a "What is this?" question to a finds or a photo forum and hope someone found something just like it before. Or maybe we'll just let it sit in a cigar box for years. But there's a better way. It's called a Web search engine. In plenty of cases, you can use a Web search engine to identify your find, or find someone who can lead you to the answer.

Web search engines -- such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), Infoseek (www.infoseek.com), Northern Light (www.nlsearch.com) -- work by typing in a word or phrase relating to your subject and then clicking on the "Search" button. (Note: If you're not hip to using search engines, don't e-mail me with questions on how to use them. Every search engine has a very comprehensive online tutorial on how to use their service most effectively. Just look for the "help" icon on the main page of their sites.)

There are three very important things to know about using the Web for information research: 1) There's an overwhelming amount of crapola on the Web, and it usually involves someone selling something, 2) There's an overwhelming amount of useful information on the Web, and it usually involves someone selling something, and 3) Any useful free information exists solely due to the kindness of strangers. Given Facts 1 and 2, count yourself very lucky if and when you find it.

But I digress. There's a good chance the answer to your question lies on the Web. And it's usually very easy to find. But judging by some of the "what is this?" questions I've seen (complete with photo scans and enough clues to elevate Inspector Clouseau to genius status), you'd think the World Wide Web plopped out of the sky yesterday. For example, someone from Austin, Texas, recently posted a question on the Treasure Net photo forum on the age and value of a button. The button featured an illustration of an old steam locomotive with the words "Ten Wheeler" above and below it.

This one seemed like a no brainer to research quickly enough to provide a helpful-enough answer. I dialed up the Infoseek site, typed in the phrase "ten wheeler" and watched as the descriptions of 92 pages containing the phrase "ten wheeler" popped up. Luckily, the first site on the page happened to have a description and history of this type of locomotive, which was produced between around 1850 to 1905. Not only did this info answer why the locomotive was important enough to be featured on the button, but it gave a probable age range of the find.

After I relayed this info to the person who posted the question, the person replied, "Thanks for the info. You obviously know trains!!" Nice compliment, but I know bupkus about trains, other than getting hit by one creates an ugly mess.

Using search engines can answer questions or provide clues about company names on old tokens and the like simply because there are two things in your favor: 1) Search engines scan all registered sites and present the ones containing your keyword(s), and 2) Everyone and his brother has a Web site these days. This means you can find info on subjects ranging from the scholarly arcane to the certifiably loony-tune. Happily, the stuff we dig out of the ground fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, so there's a 50-50 chance the info you need will be hanging out there somewhere.

Is one search engine better than another? Like our metal detectors, each does something better and worse than the others. For instance, Yahoo! is the most popular. If there's a Web page out there, it's probably been registered with Yahoo! But there are others, like Northern Light and Infoseek, that do a better job of presenting the information. I usually turn to Infoseek first because you can do subsearches within search results, which is something you can't do within Yahoo!. This is a huge advantage when your keyword search turns up a list of hundreds or thousands of somehow-related pages and you'd like to narrow things down more. Do an Infoseek on the word "train" and you'll get 2.1 million pages to slog through. Even God doesn't have that kind of time.

Like any other tool, a search engine is only good as the person using it. To really ferret out the info you need, you need to think like a reference librarian or a detective. If that doesn't work, you need to think like a clueless idiot. The operative words here are "association," "deduction" and "elimination." In other words, if your initial search comes up dry, what other phrases or words or phrases could be associated (even remotely) with what you're looking for, given the clues you do have? (This is where a search engine with a subsearch function saves scads of time.)

Let's go back to the Ten Wheeler train button. (For reference, here's the photo as it was posted, only smaller because the original was huge.) This time, let's pretend the words "Ten Wheeler" are missing. That would make it tougher, but certainly not impossible, to find out what I need to know. That's because there are still enough clues, limited as they may be. Here's how I would start my research relying on deduction, elimination and association, in that order:

Deduction
There are five wheels under the engine. Add the wheels on the other side and you have 10 wheels. Searching the phrase "10 wheel train" (or any mutation of that, including "10-wheel train," "ten wheel train" or "ten-wheel train") in Infoseek turns up no matches -- not surprising, since no train has 10 wheels. However, engines do. The search phrase "ten wheel engine" turns up one hit: a page dedicated to the restoration of Engine 1364, a steam engine that -- surprise -- looks like the one on the button and now sits on display at Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Wash. The engine, we find, has an actual designation: Ten Wheeler.

Reading the page, we're told Ten Wheelers were first built around 1850 and were used until 1905. Bingo. But does this information really answer my question? Yes and no. It gives me an time frame on which to hang an age on this button, but too wide of a window. When it comes to relics, 50 years can add or subtract a lot of value. Could we narrow it down further? Let's find out.

Elimination
What else do you call a train engine? A locomotive, of course. A search of "ten wheel locomotive" also turns up one hit: the "Bessemer And Lake Erie Railroad Steam Information" page. We have to read a little (and find out more than we'd ever like to know about old steam engines in the process), but we find out even more exact information about Ten Wheelers: They were constructed by the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works between 1893 and 1895, and only 45 were built.

Mixing a little deduction to our elimination, we could assume our find dates between 1893 and 1895. But there are two major deduction-elimination questions that could possibly prove us wrong: 1) Was the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works the only company building Ten Wheelers?, 2) This button is a railroad uniform button, and the BandLE Railroad is a long way from Austin (Lake Erie is up near Pennsylvania and Ohio). This in itself tells us our research is incomplete. Time for some wordplay. Or, as we'll see, we've been wasting a lot of time up to this time being so damn Lt. Columbo about this.

Association
If your searches turn up nothing, or if the pages you do find don't give you a definite answer, it becomes time to play a little game of word association. In other words, what words or phrases could possibly get you to where you want to be? Let's suppose my searches of "ten wheel engine" and "ten wheel locomotive" turned up nothing. What other keywords could we try? This one's obvious, too: "steam locomotive." (Sure, we could try "steam engine," but this turns up several thousand pages that have something to do with pre-1900 car motors.)

Infoseek's search of "steam locomotive" turns up a whopping 4,341 pages. A subsearch of "ten wheel" (since that's the original clue) turns up three pages -- one of which is (surprise!) our so-very-informative Bessemer And Lake Erie Railroad Steam Information page. (Amazingly, had we searched "ten wheel" instead of "ten wheel engine" or "ten wheel locomotive" in the first place, we'd be at this point much sooner. On the Web, more than one road leads to the same place, which is why it usually pays to search like a clueless dolt first.)

The other two sites -- "Illinois Railway Museum Rail and Wire Issue 152" and "ATSF All-Time Steam Roster" -- provide even more insight into the Ten Wheeler, but none that could be used to know exactly how old our button is.

The ATSF page (ATSF being an acronym for the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad) does, however, tell us how this button probably turned up in Austin: The ATSF owned Ten Wheelers, and the ATSF ran through Texas. Not only that, but it shows 1) companies other than the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works were building Ten Wheelers, and 2) Ten Wheelers were being built after the turn of the century. So basically, even with all this searching and reading, we still haven't answered our question beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Have we come to a dead end? Nope. We've just come to the time when we slap ourselves on the forehead and go "duuuuh me." We haven't done a search of the most painfully obvious keyword-by-association. How about "railroad button"? Four hits on this one, including "Jim's Page o' Plenty," described as "Joe's Ultimate List of Railroad Uniform Buttons. View a collection of uniform buttons and pins from a large variety of railroad and trolley companies." Clicking on his site and following a page link, we see Joe has published a listing of buttons.

Alas and alack, there's no listing for a "Ten Wheeler" button. But buck up little buckaroo -- there is something at his site that will probably lead us to our answer. This something is Jim's e-mail address, located the the bottom of the main home page. Joe apparently knows something about railroad buttons. At least more than we do, at any rate. Let's send him an e-mail with our scanned photo file of the button attached. Hopefully, Jim's a helpful guy and answers his e-mail. (Complimenting someone on their site and thanking them for putting up the free info always seems to hike the helpfulness factor. Even if it isn't the most whiz-bang thing you've ever come across, find something positive about it worth mentioning.)

If by some chance Joe doesn't know a thing about your button (after all, he might just be a guy who sells reproduction buttons -- we can't tell for sure from his site), we should send the same e-mail message and photo scan to the folks at the Illinois Railway Museum page. If a railway museum can't help us, by cracky, nobody can.

In the end, Web research is always a crapshoot. Sometimes you'll get the whole answer. Other times, you'll end up little table scrap clues you'll need to research further, but you'll at least have some direction ... which leaves you slightly better off than you were in the first place. And sometimes, you just have to use your noodle.

Or use it less.

© 1998 Scott Buckner