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. 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."
You can read the article I wrote last year about Steve's efforts at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2005/05/onestep_portal_.html.
No sooner did Ancestry.com announce their new offering of Canadian census records than Steve added an improved search mechanism to examine the same data. Ancestry.com's Canadian offerings are available at the web address of Ancestry.ca. The company's new 1911 Canadian Census database allows searching for surnames. Steve's search engine searches the same and many more fields: first name, middle initial, last name sounds like, last name starts with, year of birth between two different years, month of birth, and much more. The more common the surname, the more valuable Steve's search tools become.
You do require a subscription to Ancestry.ca's Canadian databases in order to use Steve Morse's One-Step 1911 Canadian Census. Armed with that subscription, you go to Steve's site first to specify the search parameters and then get transferred to Ancestry.ca to view the results.
Start first at http://stevemorse.org/census/canada1911.html
