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In our previous article Your Ancestors Free – Using Search Engines to Find Your Ancestors Free, we covered some basic strategies that would help you in tracing ancestors online. This article will expand on those strategies, and demonstrate how including geographical information and even other family members associated with your relative in your search terms, can help you to even more effectively find your ancestors free.
In this continuation of our search strategies for finding your ancestors free, we will use the same name and personal details – Henry James Miller, born around 1753 in New York City, and married to a woman named Alice, maiden name unknown. We showed how using the + sign and quotation marks could narrow down the search to find your ancestors free, but those strategies still left us with quite a bit of irrelevant information. One way to find even more targeted data on the Henry Miller we seek is to add geographical information to our search term. We know he was born in New York City in the Bronx, thus we enter our search criteria like so: Henry James Miller” + (Bronx) New York. This further reduces our returns to 168,000, down from 451,000 for “Henry James Miller”. Still, there are obviously a few Henry James Millers associated with New York, and so we need to clarify the search terms. This we can do by adding his wife’s name.
Henry James Miller” + (Bronx) New York+Alice will bring forth those results with Alice in them toward the top of the listings. This further narrows down our returns to about 120,000, some of the first of which are Marriage Records. Now we’re getting somewhere. You can add criteria such as Marriage Licence or Birth certificate to help find your ancestors free even faster, you are only limited by your imagination.
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There are a few other ways to get the most relevant content returned when trying to find your ancestors free. As we used the + sign previously, we can also control the results of our search by using the – (minus) sign. This will exclude certain results, as the returns for the book Daisy Miller in our previous exercises. Sometimes searching a phrase when trying to find your ancestors free might be too exact. Such an example would be if you're subject is listed with a nickname, or you don't know his or her middle name – you may not find the data with a phrase search. This might be overcome by using the wildcard term – the asterisk *. Using a term such as Henry * James Miller for instance, returns many middle names and initials which could help you to locate your ancestors free.
Number ranges can also be useful when searching your ancestors free. You can specify number ranges in the Google search engine by inserting two periods between the numbers. Our example for instance was born around 1753, so we could type something like “Henry James Miller” 1750..1755, which would look for content specific to Henry James Miller between 1750 and 1755. You could also add “Birth Certificate” to make your search even more precise.
There are a few other features offered by Google which can help to hone the results you get from searching your ancestors free. Using the phrase allintitle exactly as written (no spaces) will return only results with your term in the page title. The intext function operates similarly, and will return only pages with the term within their text.
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It is well worth taking the time to learn the intricacies and special features offered by Google and other search engines. Investing a little time in a tutorial may save you a bundle of time in the long run, and help you to find your ancestors free. There are tutorials available on YouTube and Google Videos - why not practice your newly learned search techniques, and try to find them now; it’ll be good practice for when you commence the search to find your ancestors free!