Googling Your Ancestor?
Last week, I wrote about how i used a will to knock down a brick wall (Article Here). I found the will through googling some of my relatives to see if there was anything interesting out there to give me some depth into their lives. This seems to suggest using a search engine, such as Google (there other reputable search engines!) can help with genealogical research. As an example I am going to use my ancestor, Simon Pearce from Chardstock.
Obviously, just googling there name is more than likely going to lead to thousands of irrelevant results, with some not really much to do with the name you searched for, searching for just 'Simon Pearce' comes up with 14,400,000 results - obviously not going to be very helpful!
So add a place where they lived or their occupation, if you know it and you may come up with more relevant results. So 'Simon Pearce Chardstock', which came up with some good information, but still a lot of irrelevant information.
So search using advanced search or search with quotation marks, so "Simon Pearce" "Chardstock", don't put it all in together as it will look for these 3 words (in this case) in a row, putting "The Name" in one set and "Place" in another will search for all pages with the exact name and place in them.
This comes up with a good PDF with additional information about deaths and burials in Chardstock. If I scroll down to September 1836, I see a newspaper report, from the Morning Post on the 24 September 1836. It tells us about how he and a colleague died, from inhaling toxic carbonic acid gas, trying to save a George Rice.
I already had the date of burial for Simon , on the 19 September, but this gives us a cause of death, as well as probable death date as this had happened on a Wednesday, not the Wednesday before the 24 as this would be after their burial, but probably the Wednesday before that on the 14 September. This is all valuable information, that I may not have been able to find without Googling for him. I may have looked for him in the newspaper archives eventually, but now I know more about the death; I will look to see what else I can find about him!
Published: 22 October 2015
Comment Form is loading comments...
Happy birthday to my genealogy friend, Andrew!
*Note - No copyright infringement was intended. If there is a breach in copyright contact me through the 'Contact' section so it can be removed. All photos are Copyright © 2015 Harry Clarke. All Rights Reserved. The homepage photo and the photos included in this article is courtesy of Michael Fertik.
*Note - No copyright infringement was intended. If there is a breach in copyright contact me through the 'Contact' section so it can be removed. All photos are Copyright © 2015 Harry Clarke. All Rights Reserved. The homepage photo and the photos included in this article is courtesy of Michael Fertik.