Genealogy Searching ... more than Google

There are extensive features on Google which means you will undoubtedly turn up something in almost every search you perform. If your search turns up over a million hits, you will undoubtedly want to review how you are searching and do something different.

Google is the preferred search engine of many genealogists. There are extensive features on Google which means you will undoubtedly turn up something in almost every search you perform. You can do a basic search, use operands such as quotation marks, or perform an advanced search. If your search turns up over a million hits, you will undoubtedly want to review how you are searching and do something different.

Image search on Google is helpful when doing genealogy. You might find a photograph of an ancestor, a tombstone or building. Looking for a book out of copyright? Try searching on Google books. Google maps will provide you with maps to current locations, such as courthouses and libraries and plot your directions. You can also look at the terrain and in many cases zoom down to ground level to look around. There are genealogy videos to explore on Google. You might also want to check out Google's News Archives.

Even more fun, try Google Earth, which a free download and takes you around the world to look for ancestral places. You can plot out where your ancestors' purchased land, find the old cemetery where they are buried and look around at villages and cities.

Genealogy related search engines are available and should be checked just as often as Google. Mocavo.com is dedicated to finding ancestors and automating your family research. It is free or you can subscribe. By using this search engine, you can focus on only genealogically related items.

Family Tree Searcher will search for your ancestor on nine sites. The sites are Ancestry World Tree, Computerized Ancestor, One World Tree, World Vital Records, Public Member Tree @ Ancestry.com, One Great Family, My Trees.com, My Heritage.com, FamilySearch, Genealogy.com and GeneaNet. Some of the sites require a subscription.

Surname Finder - The Genealogy Search Engine On The Web will search their resources for 1,731,359 surnames. This also locates in various other databases, some of which are subscription sites.

Geneanet will search over 954,385,601 entries for ancestral information. The results are broken down by topic instead of database. They are online family trees, archives, indexes, photographs and more.

Also available on Internet are search engines such as Bing, Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Dogpile, Yippy, Excite and even more. Bing maps is somewhat different from Google maps. However, the Bing map will provide you will the name of the county once you have made a match with the community. Dogpile and some of the others are meta search engines which means they search other search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Use more than one search engine and use them often. Try various techniques for searching. Be sure you understand the features of the search engine, particularly those dedicated to genealogy searching.