Buchanan
County
History Project - Google Searching |
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Over the years I have helped many people locate information on their ancestors using only the Google web site. Google is not a genealogy site, it is a search engine or a map to all the information that can be found on the Internet. Every day Google scans millions of web sites and has indexed in its vast computer memory banks over 5 billion web pages. Sometimes the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming for someone who is just starting to research their ancestry on the Internet. A search for the name Randolph Smith might return over 1 million web sites. Too many times I have witnessed people giving up on Google before they fully learn how powerful the search engine can be. For example, assume all you know about your ancestor is that his name is James Justice, he was married to a woman named Elizabeth, had at least one son named Asheville, and he lived somewhere on Knox Creek around 1850. An initial search for James Justice on Google will give your around 5,150,000 possible web sites to comb through. At this point most people will look at the first 50 sites indexed and give up on the other five million web sites. Somewhere in that five million web sites is the key that will help unlock that doorway to their family’s past. Don’t give up. There are lots of tricks and search tips you can use to find the information you need. First, try to narrow the search a bit. One of the most powerful tools for searching Google is the use of quotation marks. Quotation marks perform a search on the exact text string you type inside them. For example, a search for [ “James Justice” ] (the brackets indicate the typed search) now only yields 3,500 pages and not the 5 million the first search produced. Now we have narrowed the search by over 99.9%. If you check the first few sites and decide to need to narrow the search even further, you can also add (+) and (-) signs to your search to help you along. Let’s try a search using the wife’s first name: [ “John Justice” + Elizabeth ] This time I find only 1,620 pages. I must understand though that I now am looking only at the pages that contain the text string “John Justice” and the word Elizabeth. If there is a land grant record on the Internet that does not mention Elizabeth’s name then I need to modify my search to make sure I have exhausted all the possibilities out there. At this point I will try about 25 different searches to make sure that I have covered most of the possible combinations of searches: [ “John Justice” ] – general search The list of possible searches is almost endless and you are never sure when that exact combination of search terms will reveal exactly what you need. It takes just a second to modify a search, so try as many as you can. Let’s say, for example, you find out while you are searching that Elizabeth’s maiden name is Davis. You might try a completely different line of searching using this new information: [ “Elizabeth Davis” + Knox ] – Wife’s name
plus part of the location A marriage record might be located by: [ Buchanan + marriage + Justice + Davis ] Be sure to incorporate any new information you uncover into other searches. For example, if you discover that Knox Creek runs through the town of Hurley then you might want try adding the term “Hurley” to some of the above searches. If you determine a land grant was awarded to John Justice on Guesses Fork then try adding the term “Guesses” to some of the searches. Make sure you try any different spelling of a name or location. Google does not consider Smith and Smyth as the same. It will not find Virginia when you look for VA. It will find SMITH when you type smith as Google searches are not case sensitive. Sometimes you will run across web pages that are very long and full of thousands of names (such as a long list of marriage records). To find the one you are looking for simply click on the Edit button at the top of the browser bar and click on Find – On this Page . You can type in a last name and using the Find Next button, locate every instance of that name on the page. If you know an approximate date for an event you can also search Google by date ranges. You might want to look for any reference to “John Justice” between 1845 and 1850 in the Knox Creek area. A search for this information might look like: [ “John Justice” + Knox + 1845..1850 ] The use of the word OR (upper case only) can be very useful in searches. Lets say you are looking for information on the Ratliff family in the Garden Creek area from 1860 to 1870. A search for that information might look like: [ Ratliff OR Ratcliff OR Ratliffe + Garden + 1860..1870 ] This search would pick up any instance of the most common spellings in the area at the time. A search for an obituary might look like: [ obit OR obituary OR obituaries + “John Justice” ] Let’s say you find out that there is a James Justice that lived in Buchanan County, Missouri and you keep turning up pages for this person and not the one in Buchanan County, Virginia. You could write your search in such a way to help eliminate the Missouri Justice family from your search results. This search might look like: [ “John Justice” + “Buchanan Co.” –Missouri –MO ] This search will show the pages that contain John Justice and Buchanan County but do not contain the words Missouri or the state abbreviation MO. Finally, after several searches, you see a page summary in Google that looks like it has exactly the information you need. You click on the link and up pops the dreaded “Cannot Locate Page” or “Page or Server Cannot be Located.” Someone has moved their site or has decided they no longer want to post their genealogy research on the Internet. All is not lost. Click the Back button of your browser and then select the “Cached” link at the bottom of the page description in Google. This will open up a saved copy of the removed page. This page is not actually coming off the original site but is coming from massive storage databanks at Google. Sometimes this is the only way to retrieve genealogy information that has been removed from the web. Sometimes you can find information just by browsing through the Google Genealogy Directory. This directory can be located at: http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Genealogy Surfing through the directory in this fashion can sometimes lead you to new discoveries or prompt you into looking at areas that you might not have considered. Google can also serve as a calculator. Let’s say you find a record that lists your ancestor as 68 years old in 1903. Simply type [ 1903-68 ] into the Google search box to find an approximate birth date of 1835. Also if you are researching an old family deed and locate a reference to a length of 87 rods or poles, simply type [ 87 rods in feet ] to give you the converted length. Many of our local deeds use the term of pole for length. A pole is the same as a rod or 16.5 feet. Google can now find some similar terms using the tilde (~) key. A search for ~genealogy might return results for similar searches such as family history, family tree, etc. Sometimes your family history search can take you across the ocean and you might have to search pages that are in Spanish or German. Google can help here too. When a page is in a foreign language you have the option to translate it into English using Google. This article only begins to cover the power of Google searches. To find out more check out the Google How To Site at: http://www.google.com/help/index.html The Internet has truly revolutionized genealogy. More family research has been conducted in the past 10 years than has in the previous 1,000 years. Someone, somewhere, has the information you need to extend those family lines. It is up to you to learn how to find it. |
