Search Google for your ancestors
Many people start researching their family history by typing names into Google. This might work if your greatgreat-uncle was Charlie Chaplin (sadly, mine wasn’t), but most names are far too common to produce anything other than thousands of irrelevant results. How, then, can you use Google to find out more about your ancestors?
The trick is knowing at least one bit of extra information about the person you’re looking for. For example, where were they born? Start at the local level – typing something like “Daniel Hirons” Byfield – and if that’s too precise (Byfield is a small village in Northamptonshire) expand outwards. Typing “Daniel Hirons” Northants OR Northamptonshire produces additional results (see screenshot below left), including a blog post I wrote many moons ago revealing that Daniel - my great-great-grandfather – was a railway navvy ( www.snipca.com/28779).
Taking that bit of extra information, I tried to strike gold with “Daniel Hirons” railway navvy. That brings up just one hit – my own blog post. However, excluding ‘navvy’ produces a few more results, albeit nothing useful. Remember to try misspelled surnames too, and different versions.
Add job and period details
Google is hit and miss with finding individuals, but comes into its own with more general searches. Let’s start with the kind of life your ancestors led. This information in turn might uncover some surprising avenues of research. Start with their job title: in my case ‘navvy’ is too vague, but typing railway navvy produces interesting links to lots of useful resources.
I know Daniel was involved with the building of the Forth Bridge, and typing railway navvy forth bridge produces more useful hits, including access to Scottish railway record archives. Also, consider pairing occupations with periods such as ‘Victorian’, ‘1900s’ or ‘18th Century’.
If we pull all these techniques together and type 19th century grain miller Radnor we get an instant result at ( www.snipca.com/28780), namely the description of life in the Radnorshire corn mills where my Caldicott ancestors lived and worked throughout the 1800s.
And don’t forget place names
Searching for places can produce surprising results. A search for ‘Nantwich history’ revealed that the streets where my Peers ancestors lived was an area of “bad housing”, helping build a picture of the conditions they lived in.
Adding family history or parish records to place-name searches can also land you in the right place. For example, adding Cheshire parish records uncovers the excellent Cheshire Parish Register Project ( http://cprdb.csc.liv.ac.uk), letting me explore my Peers family line back before 1837.
Armed with these techniques, you can go hunting for photos of your ancestors, assuming they exist and have been uploaded somewhere. Go to and start with your ancestor’s name. Much of the time you may have to experiment with different search phrases, but we hit the jackpot straight away by adding the Scottish town ‘largs’ to a search for Daniel (see screenshot above). Largs is one of the places where Daniel Hirons worked on the railway and where the photo was taken.