Search Tips Every Genealogist Should Know

I think with genealogy I have compared it to what makes the most sense to me – a sudoku puzzle. With sudoku you are given certain perimeters and a limited amount of information, and you need to use that to fill in the blanks you are given. Sometimes it can be a mental exercise for the sake of a mental exercise.

Genealogy has sharpened a lot of the skills I use in my everyday work. I’ve been doing research for so long, and understand search terms and search delineators from all my genealogy research. Here are some of my favorites, that I encourage other genealogists to use:

“ “  (quotations)

Quotations are tricky. Sometimes it can severely limit the results, other times it forces the Google search’s hand. It’s good for when you need a keyword or key phrase to absolutely appear. In your search results. I do this a lot in obituary searches. There is an abundance of obituaries so when you are looking for a certain person’s name it helps if you put a location in quotations:

Jane smith obituary “Maine” will produce better results that Jane Smith obituary Maine

–  (minus)

You put this right in front of a word. My favorite example is trying to get results about John Wayne the actor, without dealing with results that are for John Wayne Gacy the serial killer, so you search like this:

John Wayne -Gacey

There you go pilgrim!

I have one ancestor who was an American Civil War veteran and there was maybe two or three other vets with his same name. Sometimes when I do a search for him I subtract out their locations, so something like

john smith civil war -minnesota -ohio 

Site:

For a genealogist, I’m sometimes bad at taking notes on where I find information, or saving it in a way that is easy to find. My brain can usually tell me where I found the data – but finding it again can be tricky. For that, I use site:

You put it at the front of your search, and it limits the search to the specific website you put in. For example I’ve been scouring UMaine’s archives recently for some ancestor stuff, so I can do:

site:umaine.edu Jane Smith