Saturday, April 28, 2007

Easy Google Genealogy Searcher, Part II

This genealogy search tool, powered by Google, offers specialized searches for finding ancestors in historic books, historical society and other scholarly articles, genealogy blogs, and US patent searches. The Google Genealogy Searcher Part II uses Google to search databases that you may have not known existed.

Easy Google Genealogy Searcher, Part II

With the Google Searcher, Part II, you can search:

Google Books
Search the full text of public domain books that Google has digitized. You can download, save and print the book for free. These books include genealogy books, county history books, military books, municipal annual reports, and other out-of-copyright books that include the names of regular folks. This is a great resource. I found my Civil War ancestors in their regimental histories, and biographical data of other ancestors in county books. And Google continues to scan and digitize books.

Google Scholar
Search historical society papers, journal articles and college thesis for your ancestor. (I actually found a college thesis about an ancestor of my husband who had been a city mayor about 100 years ago - so you never know what you will find until you search)

Google Patent
Google Patent Search Search US patents issued from 1776 to the present. Patents were not just issued to inventors and researchers, but also to factory workers, farmers, miners and many other regular people. I searched for the county where my ancestors lived, and browsed the many patents. While I didn't find anything specific for my family, I was able to get a general sense about the county during the time my family lived there.

Google Blog
Search for ancestors, genealogy topics, locations, or relatives. There are thousands of genealogy blogs today. Some genealogy blogs are about individual family research and some blogs make genealogy database announcements complete with surnames. This is a huge untapped resource to search for your ancestors.

And don't forget the original
Easy Google Genealogy Searcher
Puts advanced Google features useful for genealogy searching on one page with suggested keywords and ideas for use in genealogy to help make the most of your genealogy Google searches.

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