Genealogy Chat

I have just given this suggestion to a couple of posters on the living relatives board and I thought it might be helpful for other 'helpers' who have not run into google's different country sites ( I have used them in my work to look for documents in other countries and knowing about them has been useful for me sometimes, I found information about a distant cousin in Australia ... now if only I could find him ! )




google has different sites for different countries

for example

www.google.ca
www.google.com.au

and so on ( just like this site :-) )

if you search at one of them then when you get results you can choose 'pages in Canada' ... or Australia etc ... on the left side

if you are searching for Mary Brown this will not be helpful

but if you are searching for someone whose name is less common countries like Canada and Australia and New Zealand have smaller populations and possibly you will find something that could be useful

a person could be listed at their employer's website or on the website of a charity or a community group

sometimes it is possible to find obituaries by doing a search at google

search for names in different forms with quotation marks for example

"mary jane brown"
"brown mary j"

this may not work but it can be surprising sometimes ... by narrowing the search to a particular country you may be able to narrow the search results enough to get at least some manageable possibilities to investigate


edit because it would have been helpful of me to include more links :-)

www.google.co.nz
www.google.co.za

for the United States you have to go to

www.google.com

and then on the left it says 'more search tools' and you can choose 'custom location' and put a placename in the box

Thank you for this information. I will try your tips.
Bridget