Google is Your Friend, part 3: Google Scholar

By Jim Thornhill

Along with many other genealogists, I have been encouraging people to add context to their family trees. Context, the environment, and events that surrounded your ancestors will give deeper meaning to your family tree, and make your ancestors seem like family. For the most part, the way to learn about the context your ancestors lived in is to read about the time and place where they lived.

There are several sources you can go to find information on how your ancestors lived. One of my favorites is journal articles. Journal articles are shorter, and the information seems to be more focused than in a book, requiring less time to read. But how do you find them? Google Scholar.

Simply type https://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en into your browser, and you get a screen that looks like this:

You can use many of the same search terms you would use in a typical search, which can focus your results.

I’ve been doing research on Thomas Jefferson Rusk for a presentation, so I typed his name inside of quotation marks in the search box and was awarded with 178 journal articles, almost all of them about Rusk. Google Scholar searches titles and journal content, so the results contained articles specifically about Rusk and articles about other subjects that discussed Rusk’s contributions, i.e., legal opinions in Texas where Rusk was the author. Several of the listings had links where you could download the article directly, and most of the rest had links to paywalled databases like JStor and HeinOnline. There were also some links to Google Books, where I could read the article online for free. When I searched for a location, the results were not as focused, but there were still many articles that would interest a family historian.

Next time you need to focus and go beyond what the records are telling you, try Google Scholar. With the focused and in-depth results, you won’t be sorry!