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Using Google to Find Your Ancestors
By Kathy Jones-Kristof | January 22, 2008
One place to find facts about your ancestors is on Google. That’s right. They may have been dead for a few hundred years but that doesn’t mean they can’t be Googled. You may have to be a little crafty as to what you put in the search window, however. Add the state he/she lived in or the name of the county or town where they resided to cut down on the number of hits. If you’re doing a search on “John Jones,” there’s little hope. But “Cornelius Slecht” is easy. Just sit back and see what washes up on the internet’s productive shores.
There will usually be a lot of hits with other people’s family files. If they’ve included real sources with their files such as courthouse records or published genealogies, great. If the sources listed are just references to gedcoms (genealogy program extractions) or downloads, ignore it–although I do make note of deeds or wills because those may give me locations to look for my ancestors where I hadn’t searched before. Everything else I ignore. I want facts in my family history file and facts can only be proven by verifiable sources.
There are other things I find on Google that are invaluable. They have scanned books loaded online and their search engine takes you directly to the page where your ancestor is mentioned. I’ve also found maps from as far back as the 1600’s that are marked with exactly where my ancestor lived. Below is a 1736 map of Orange Co, VA with border drawings of settlers’ land patents.
Once I found via Google a sea chart for Bermuda that was drawn from soundings one of my ancestors had taken. And I found a published genealogy for an ancestor that kept me from duplicating work that had already been completed.
Give it a try. Spend a little time on Google and see if your fifth-great grandpa is out there somewhere. And don’t forget to try all those weird spellings for his name that you’ve seen in deeds and wills. Until next time, Google away!
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Topics: All Levels of Genealogists |
September 5th, 2008 at 10:45 am
[...] also covered two other unusual places to research in my posts Using Google to Find Your Ancestors and Tax [...]