Genealogy Search tips for finding your Ancestors on Google

There are tons of resources out there these days to search your family tree. Here are a few search tips that will help you find what you are actually trying to find on google.

Quotation Marks

Make sure when you are searching google for your family member that you use "quotation marks".  This will help get you what you want. Without quotation marks google will return items that have either of your search terms and they don't have to be related to one another. With quotes you will get items that are more closely related and it will contain both of your search terms.

Site specific searches..

If you are looking to get search results from a certain website only you can limit your search just type the following:

Site:ancestory.com "john doe"  

This will return items on john doe from ancestory.com only.

Use a date range

Be sure to use dates in your searches when you can. Even if you don't know the actual dates just a date range you can narrow down your google search by adding dates.  This will help tremendously when you are hunting for birth, death, and marriages but are not sure of the exact dates. You do this by adding the DATE..DATE to the search.

You can simply add the following to your search: 1920..1925

So if I am hunting for John Doe who died between 1920 to 1925 then you can narrow down your results by searching the following:

"John Doe" 1920..1925 

The results will include at least one of the dates above. Please note this doesn't exclude other dates however there is a way to do that too!

Exclude results

If you are getting results that you would like to exclude because they are not what you need. For example: If your John Doe results keep giving you John Doe from SC and you know that your John Doe was from NC you can exclude that from your search. Simply use a minus sign to do so. You can exclude websites this way too. So you would type the following to search for John Doe without SC.

"John Doe" -SC

Search Page Titles or Page Text

You can search for page titles by adding the term allintitle: directly before your search terms. Then google will return websites whose titles are whatever you were searching for. You can also search only the page text by adding allintext: before your search terms. 

Example:

allintitle:"John Doe" would return pages titled John Doe

I hope that you find some of these tips useful!