Genealogy Chat

I was bored one night so went on goole and put in a surname i am researching in my tree. Google came up with over two thousand entries and i started to search them .After about two hours i came across an entry which turned out to be a 'looking for any living relatives' ad which was placed in a local newspaper over two years ago. It gave an e-mail address , so i thought i'd chance writing a short message to the man who had placed the ad. It turned out - after a few e-mails later, that his ggg grandfather was my ggg grandfathers brother. The gent who had placed the ad was from Canada , i live in the North West of England. So if your fed up and have a few hours to kill - try Google. You never know.

I did that once and found a second cousin. we corresponded by email for weeks before discovering that we only lived a few miles apart! Have been good friends ever since!! Christine in NZ

I find that GOOGLE has a tendency to give too many commercial (i.e. advertising) matches. If you search on a place name you often get page after page of sites offering to tell you the names of garages, solicitors, plumbers etc etc in that place even when it is only a tiny village with a couple of houses. I often find that VIVISIMO gives more useful matches when GOOGLE is only giving irrelevant ones. GOOGLE can be useful though, don't forget that you can also search USENET groups from it and also search for images. MB

Could you please elaborate on Visimo and what you can do with Google (for a thicko please).

was wondering the same thing. So two thicko's lol.

Thanks for the info re Vivisimo - i had a quick look and it looks promising, so have now saved it to favs. And yes, googling does tend to throw up a lot of rubbish and trolling thru it all can get boring. Sue

Someone on another thread suggested putting in your own name with an ' either side of it to see what it brought up. Lots of bits of info where I have been on various genealogy sites asking questions! Also lots of artists, writers and professors! BUT also a transvestite!

Hi All, There are tips for using Google to search for ancestors at this site: http://www.searchforancestors(.)com/archives/google.html Barbara

Actually got into Family search using Vivisimo, so it's clearly reaching parts that Google cannot.