Google is your friend
By Jim Thornhill
Using Dates
Have you ever searched for someone and gotten results on living people? I know I have. Your search for your ancestor pulls up doctors, realtors, carpet cleaning companies, etc. Fortunately, Google has developed a solution for us. You can search for your ancestor using a specific date range. Using my ancestor Joshua Seale as an example, I can search for “Joshua Seale” 1775…1865 and search only for things that related to Joshua during his lifetime.
If you try this search on your own, you will find, as I did, that it is not perfect. I got results for any Joshua Seale, not just my grandfather. I also got results for current day people that were associated with numbers in the date range I selected, such as a golfer at an event with 1800 people in attendance. But I also got pages of search results just about my ancestor. It seems like every time I do this search I find something new.
Joshua Seale is probably the ancestor I have researched the most. When I did a new date search for him when writing this article, I found four sources that I had not seen before, just on the first page of the search. If you have not tried this search before, it’s worth doing!
Get Specific
If you are like me, you are familiar with this google search tool but often forget to use it. Applying quotation marks around a word or phrase can limit the number of “hits” you get when you do a Google search. In a recent search I did on my great grandfather, Joshua Seale, entering his name without quotes yielded 664,000 results. But when I added quotes to his name, the search yielded 6690.
You can also use quotes to limit only part of your search term. For example, if I search for “Joshua Seale” in Jasper County, this brings the results down to 664. For me, this is a manageable number. If I limit it further to “Joshua Seale” in Jasper County, Texas, we cut it in half again to 335.
You might ask, “Aren’t more results better than fewer?” The problem with more results in any search engine is that the computer, for reasons that I don’t understand, will probably put the results that you want about 16 pages into the search! I don’t have the time or the patience to look through that many results. If we craft our searches in terms the computer understands, we can focus our searches and help Google find what we need it to find…but more on that next time.
Taming Goliath
The internet is full of valuable information for Family Historians. These sites include major libraries, genealogy websites, internet archives, and many others too numerous to mention. The problem is I don’t have the time to spend weeks searching these giant sites for information on my ancestors. I am guessing you don’t either.
Believe it or not, Google has a solution! It’s Google site search. Go to any Google search page or box, and enter in “site:website search terms.” For example, I wanted to search the Library of Congress website, a mammoth site full of information and images relating to our ancestor’s lives, for my ancestor Joshua Seale. I entered “site:loc.gov “Joshua Seale.” Notice I did not have to enter in the https:// and I put Joshua Seale in quotes to narrow the search. There is also a space between the site address and the search term. What came up was a book written about the Seale family. I tried the same search for another ancestor, Richard Seale, and found two newspaper articles about Richard Seale.This means that Google went into the Library of Congress website, searched the tens or hundreds of thousands of newspapers, and found the two that mentioned this name.
I was impressed! But what about a place? I did another search, “site:loc.gov Alamo,” and got 26000 articles and pictures about the Alamo, including the one you see here. This is going to be a game-changer for me. I have been avoiding these huge sites, not because they did not have valuable information, but because I did not have the time or the patience to search these giant sites. Now I have a tool to make them more manageable. Thank you Google!
