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Genealogy Research

The internet is the largest repository of information in the world. And that is also its downside. Locating the valuable information that is out there to help us research our past can be a formidable task, particularly because as the amount of information grows, so the number of 'hits' increases when we undertake any search.

Searching the internet is like searching for the proverbial needle. However, remember that there are various ways to search the content of the internet and you can waste a lot less time chasing dead ends if you learn how to search more efficiently.

Search engines are the card indexes of the internet - searchable databases of websites collected by special programs called crawlers, spiders or robots. These scour the internet and index the text they contain into a very large database. There are many such search engines and each has different strengths when searching for different types of information. Among the more powerful search engines for research purposes are Google (www.google.com), Northern Light (www.northernlight.com), FASTSearch (www.alltheweb.com), Alta Vista (www.altavista.com), Ask (www.ask.com) and Vivisimo (http://vivisimo.com). Yahoo (www. yahoo.com) is slightly different, being a search directory rather than a search engine, but it is one of the largest guides to the web.

Undertaking a search using any of the search engines or directories appears to be very straightforward: you type in what you're looking for and click on the 'Search' or 'Go' button. The result: thousands of sites are returned. To work your way through this mass of information could take hours of valuable time. Possibly the fi rst dozen or so entries may include what you want, and are the more likely to, but they may very well not. So, how can you make your searching more effective?

The judicious use of quotation marks is an essential part of successful internet searching. If you search for 'Brighton Palace Pier fire', using quotation marks, search engines will treat the words as an exact phrase and you will get around 45 hits. If you don't use the quotation marks you will get over 38,000 hits.

You can also use what are called Boolean operators to undertake more complex and focused searches. The most important of these are AND, OR and NOT: instead of AND you can usually use '+', and for NOT use '-'. Therefore, using 'Palace Pier' + Brighton - fire will search for the exact phrase 'Palace Pier' with the word ' Brighton ', but not the word 'fire', in the same article. Brackets can also be used together with the Boolean operators. '(Palace OR West) Pier' +Brighton, for example, will search for entries that include either 'Palace Pier' or 'West Pier' and the word ' Brighton '.

An asterisk '*' is used as a wild-card when making a search. It stands for one or more letters, or none. Some search engines require a minimum number of letters to the left of the asterisk, two or three. Therefore 'Robert*' will find 'Robert', 'Roberts', 'Robertson' and so forth. 'Wil*son' will find 'Wilson', 'Willson' and 'Wilkinson'.

Searching for information online is easy so long as you develop the mind and methods of a detective. You need to translate your problem into a language that can be used to search the internet: effectively, a series of key words and symbols. You could try something like 'Richard Spears' + (married OR marriage) + Sutton + Surrey. There are a number of useful keywords for genealogical searches apart from' genealogy' itself: ancestors, descendants, family history, birth/born, marriage/married, death/died. Lastly, remember that there is sometimes a difference between UK English and US English, so watch your spelling: centre/center, labourer/laborer and the like.


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