Using Google’s Domain Search
This is my first blog post on blog.genealogylocator.com,
our new blog here GenealogyLocator.com.
My name is Scott Turton and will go by the pen name of “familysearcher” on this blog.
I am one of the site editors responsible for locating the web-based family history
and genealogy content for GenealogyLocator’s search database.
In this post I will outline a worthwhile method to find genealogy and family history
data on the web by using Google’s vast search engine. I will show you how to use Google’s
domain search. Sometimes, genealogy related web sites and repositories are not well
integrated in terms of searching and finding what you are looking for. In these cases,
you can use google to help. Here is one of these types of web sites. It doesn’t seem
to be meant for user interaction at all, as its just a repository of genealogy-related
text files, categorized by state, county, and documentation type, such as cemeteries,
census, directories, history, military, photos, and schools. This is the URL, or web
address: http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/
Now, if we know the exact county and state to look in, then there is not much of a
problem, but what do we do if we would like to search on all of the states…how would we
do that? Enter google, our friendy search engine. We can enter the following into
Google as search terms (without the double-quotes): “site:ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/”
and discover that google has indexed 2,810,000 results from this site alone! Here
is this
google search already linked for you. So, the next thing to do is to enter your
search term(s), putting a space between them and the “site” keyword there. One of
my ancestral lines is Yale, so I enter this name into the google seach box: “site:ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/
Yale” and click on the search button. Google returns 739 results that have the name
Yale in them, so that is a good start. Now I narrow down the search futher and enter
a first name: “site:ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ Yale Elihu”. This search returns
49 results and now I can start looking at each of them individually. As an aside,
Elihu Yale gave his name to Yale University by means of his large endowment, he was
the brother of a direct ancestor of mine.
This search will also work using years for census and birth/death dates, and other
names, for example, such as cemeteries, schools, or streets. You also may want to
use this search even though you know the county and state because you never know what
else you may discover.
Go ahead and try this google search method, it works very well on http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/,
and it should also work on other genealogy related sites. If you find a site this
method works well on, please post a comment here about it. Tomorrow, I will show you
how to use this google search method on a site that already has a search engine,
to find variations of results which you would not otherwise discover.
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