The following is from a series of family history instructional blog posts by 1 Assist Care of the Valley in Rexburg, Idaho. 1 Assist Care of the Valley updates family history posts each weekend.
Google wants to do some family history work for you.
No really, it does.
And it wants to keep you updated you on a thousand different family history searches as it does.
At this year’s RootsTech conference, Deborah Gamble, Technology Solutions Manager at American Express gave a list of tools that will perform customized family history searches for you automatically. Google was the first one Ms. Gamble mentioned. 1 Assist Care of the Valley: Assisted Living At Home in East Idaho will address some of the others in future posts.
Google has a feature called “Alerts” that allows users to stay informed about new material on the web relating to any topic that the user is interested in. If they want to stay updated on Teton Valley hiking spots or powersports in Rexburg or Idaho Falls, you can use this tool to do just that. What Ms. Gamble pointed out was that this exact same tool is a powerful one for doing family history research.
Here are step-by-step instructions with screenshots.
Let’s say you are looking for search for the death of an ancestor who I think was buried in Loudoun County.
Step One: First you go to www.google.com/alerts
It will bring up a page that should have something like this. If you click on the image, you can make the image larger:
Step 1: Go to www.google.com/alerts
Step 2: Next, you will enter the search term you are looking for. In this example, I am looking for Loudoun County graves. I enter that term into my Search query. You can make this more specific or less specific.
The more general you make it, the more information you will receive, but you might miss something as the Google search “spiders” might not pick it up.. The more specific you make it, the less information you will receive, but you are likely to find very specific information as it becomes available.
You will see below what Google brings up. Again, you can click on the image to make it larger. But you will see it brings up examples on the right of what it will send you.
Step 2: Enter what you are looking for into the search query
Step 3: Choose the result type, how often, and how many you want.
Result Type – Choose what source you want the information from. You can choose from the following. Remember, the less option you choose, the less information.
- Do you want only news articles?
- Do you want only blog posts?
- Do you only want results from books that Google has scanned into their database?
- Do you only want videos uploaded on sites like YouTube?
- Do you want everything that appears on the Internet (All of the above)
How often – Choose how often you want to be emailed about the information on the Internet.
- Do you want an email once a day?
- Do you want an email once a week?
- Do you want an email right as it comes?
My suggestion – once a week is fine, otherwise you start filling up your email box.
How many – What do you want Google to send to you?
- All results – Google will send you everything on the Internet.
- Only the best results – Google will determine what it thinks you want and will only send you that information.
Step 4: Enter your email address that you want the information sent to. It does not have to be a gmail address. You can enter any email you want. If you are logged into Gmail, it will automatically enter that address. You can add a news feed, but to keep things simple, we will not address that here.
Step 5: Press Create Alert.
A new window that will open that looks like this:
Step 5: Create Your Alert
Step 6: Live your life as normal. Google will automaticall send you the alerts to your email.
And you are all done.
You can add more searches if you want. You can do this for up to a thousand different searches.
To continue to learn and share ways to explore your genealogy and family history, be sure to like us on Facebook.
