Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show aside to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her that one of those heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are al...
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Googling your Ancestors

I was first introduced to the idea of Googling my ancestors many years ago when I first began my research. Almost a decade ago Ancestry had a feature on the ancestor's profile that allowed you to have Ancestry conduct the Google search for you. I dont know when or why they got rid of this feature, but regardless it taught me a lot about how to use Google for genealogy. The pattern that this feature used when conducting searches was what made it so valuable. What Ancestry had managed to have this feature do was insert Google search operators around the information that you already had entered in your tree. When this is done correctly, you are left with a small handful of relevant results. 

What are Google search operators?

Google search operators are a set of characters that can be placed between and/or around your keywords. When used correctly, they can require or exclude certain terms from your results, restrict results to a specific type, limit a year range, etc. There are a wide range of operators, but I mainly use the ones in the table below. 


In the above table, the operators are given in red while the position of the keywords is given in light grey. The light grey text tells the type of keyword that can be used with each operator. Text covers all types of keywords, year applies only to numerical values, file corresponds to a file type such as doc or PFD, and site requires the full URL of a website. 

What would this look like?

Lets take a look at an example to better understand how the operators are positioned within a search command. In this example I will be looking for information on one of my ancestors named David Sword. I know that he was born in Dundee during 1822 and that he worked in Edinburgh as an iron and brass founder. Already I can dissect what I know to identify a list of keywords. For this search I want to use the terms: David Sword, ironfounder, and Edinburgh. 

When I type the three keywords above into Google without using any operators I am met with 757,000 results. None of the top results are strong matches for what I am searching for. To further narrow down my results I can place quotes around his name. The search command I am now entering into Google is "David Sword" ironfounder Edinburgh. When I do this I am met with 5 highly relevant results. 


As you can see from the screen clipping above I have one results for a site that lists the names of British sculptors, and three results for nearby city directories. 

Iterative search techniques

One of my favourite things to do when Googling an ancestor is iterate on my keywords. As I go through a relevant results I make a list of new information and the corresponding keywords that I want to search for. In the case of the above example I learned from the first result that David was operating his business out of 66 Fountainbridge. This address corresponded to the Hopetoun Foundry which was owned by Learmont &Co. When I conducted my next searches I chose to adjust them to include terms such as "Fountainbridge", "Learmont", and "Hopetoun Foundry". 

Invert the name
One of the most common mistakes that people make when Googling their ancestor is that that type the name in the order they would pronounce it, then place quotations around it. This automatically removes the results which feature the name in an inverted order. For this example, that means I would conduct a search using "Sword, David". 

There are a large number of sources which lists names in this order. Record sets such as city directories and government indexes belong to this group. 


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