Using One-Step Genealogy Webpages by Stephen P. Morse

Stephen P. Morse’s One-Step Webpages are some of the most quietly powerful tools in the entire genealogy world. They look simple—plain text pages, long lists of links, a retro design—but beneath the surface is a sophisticated suite of search utilities that outperform the original databases they interface with.

Morse’s tools were originally created to solve problems in Ellis Island passenger searches, but over two decades they have expanded into a massive ecosystem:

• Advanced passenger list search engines
• Alternative interfaces to Castle Garden, Ellis Island, Hamburg, Galveston, and other ports
• Tools for census, vital records, military, voting, and naturalization
• Utilities for name variations, fuzzy searching, wildcards, transliteration, and phonetic equivalency

They are incredibly useful because they allow you to search beyond what official search forms permit, bypassing limitations, correcting indexing problems, and revealing results the original website fails to display. This Quicksheet focuses primarily on the passenger tools—the core of Morse’s system—and provides an overview of the rest so you understand the full research potential.

Download the Quicksheet

To obtain the six-page Quicksheet PDF with details about the site for easy reference, you can download it by clicking on the Download button:

For all the previously published Quick Reference Guides, click on QuickSheets. 

Genealogy QuickSheets – Frequently Asked Questions