Google your family tree - Book Review

Mon, 1st Jun 2009

FYI, this story is more than a year old

It is always exciting when a new book covering your favourite hobby/obsession is published – especially one that is geared to the once-a-week user, the everyday user and the all-day user!

What is there for the once-aweeker? Search Engine Basics, Search Engine Advanced, Getting started – how to trace your family tree, Baker’s dozen Hints & Tips, Google Alerts, Worksheets.

For every-dayers: using blogs to further your research, finding gold in Google Books, the World on your Desktop, Fun & Games with Google Toolbar. For all-dayers: Notebook to organise your research, Search whilst you sleep, ‘Travel’ to ancestral homes, Getting the best from Images & Video Archives, Step into rich historical news archives, Top sites for genealogists.

Any regular genealogy searcher will be familiar with using ~ (tilde) in searches for words similar to genealogy.

Dan lists 15 words Google will find with this search, including ancestry, family, family tree, geneology, records, roots and vital records. (Remember you can use ~ when searching for surnames too.)

I plan to investigate the chapter on Google Notebook – perhaps I could use this instead of TreePad ? There’s lots to try in the Google Toolbar chapter too. Google Earth and Google Maps are two more chapters which have uses beyond our genealogy, as does the Tips and Tricks chapter.

Google Your Family Tree is a book you could give your NGS (non genealogical spouse or partner), because there is so much of interest in using Google, and then be able to use it yourself! Perhaps you can even entice your NGS to help with your searches.

Google Your Family Tree has lots of illustrations and examples, and worksheets you can photocopy and use.

See the March 2009 NetGuide for an interview with Dan about his book (pg 20). And go here to see videos and view sample pages, hints and tips.