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Finding your ancestors free online has become easier than ever. There are mounds of genealogical records stored in huge mega-bases around the internet, but you still need to find them. Everyone uses search engines to navigate their way around the net, but understanding the intricacies of how to use a search engine to its full potential is a valuable skill that can accelerate the quest to find your ancestors free. In this article we'll share a few search engine tricks and skills that you may not have known about to help you to quickly find your ancestors free.
Although the amount of resources that can help you to find your ancestors free has greatly increased over the last ten years, an ancestry search can still present certain challenges. One such task confronting researchers is the necessity to sort through all of the non-relevant data that may be returned by a search engine. But search engines properly used can eliminate much of that unwanted material from the get-go. Search engines are basically programs that are designed to scour the internet and return information gleaned from websites it is asked to investigate. When we type a search term into a search engine window, we are basically "programming" the search engine to look for websites containing those exact phrases, terms, or words. As you can imagine, the challenge to finding your ancestors free is to "program" the search engine as efficiently as possible by entering a term or phrase that is as accurate and descriptive as can be.
The thing you are most likely to do when trying to find your ancestors free is to type their name directly into a search engine. Many people do this, I've done it myself with interesting results, but although search engines are quite clever, we need to give them a little more criterion to search by than just our relative's name. As an example I'll use the name of an associate's relative to illustrate how we can more precisely program a search engine to find your ancestors free. The person we are searching is named Henry James Miller, born in New York, New York around 1753. We know he was sometimes referred to as Harry or Hank, and his wife was named Alice.
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First typing in Henry James Miller in the search box initially returns over 7,000,000 results, most of which are for websites with information about the book Daisy Miller by Henry James, in fact 28 out of the first 30 listings had to do with that book and its author. As you can see, we need to help the search engine to find your ancestors free by giving them a little more detail to work with. One of the ways we can do this is by using the + sign. The + sign programs the computer to only search for phrases with the exact words we enter. So if we type Henry+James+Miller+Hank+New York, we receive less than 250,000 returns, and most of it is about different Henry Miller's nicknamed Hank, who had some sort of association with New York; and much of it is genealogical information which can help you to find your ancestors free. Only phrases or sites with all five of those words in them are returned to us, thus sorting through much of the irrelevant data that is out there.
The value of using Quotation Marks to find your ancestors free is that they command the search engine to specify the exact form of the word or phrase to search. Placing quotation marks as such around "Henry James Miller" will eliminate all of those items we previously got concerning the book Daisy Miller. I did this and received 451,000 items back rather than the 7,000,000 our first search returned, and they were all related to the exact phrase, with many family trees, bibliographies, and even family group records containing that name returned.
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Using this strategy you reduce the number, and improve the quality of your search results. They will give you a general idea of the potential search engines have to locate your ancestors free if you know how to use them. The best strategies for finding your ancestors free involve using very specific search terms, which we cover in our article Advanced Search Terms to Find Your Ancestors Free.