In this week's Kith and Kin, Peter Munro from the Borders Family History Society, shares how he uses an easy research tool to build his family tree...

 

I made a huge leap forward in part of my family tree last week.

I use a mechanism, ‘Google Alerts’, to advise me when there is new content that may interest me on the internet.

My tip to you is to consider using it to help you in your research.

This is not a new mechanism but it is one that is simple to use.

I’ve demonstrated its use in the talks and workshops that I’ve done for several family history societies, Kelso Writers and Berwick 900.

It’s useful in any sort of research or even to find out what other people are saying about you on the internet.

You’re probably aware that search engines like Google wander from website to website, reading the text, and indexing words and phrases, pictures, videos and other types of files.

That’s how, when you search Google, it gives you links to websites where the searched for word or phrase occurs.

Of course, it can only show results from websites it has visited and you need to repeat that same search in the future to get new results.

For family history (and any other kind of research), the phrase or name that you’re looking for might not be on a website today but somebody might be writing about it next week, next month, next year and it would be useful to know that; wouldn’t it?

That’s where Google Alerts comes in handy. What do you need to do?

First Google “Google Alerts” and click on the first result. That should take you to the Google Alerts page. There it tells you to “Create an alert about…” and you type your query in that field.

In my case, a long time in the past, I typed in “Aristide Blank” — the son of my father’s great uncle. Below the query, there’s a button “Create Alert”.

Before you do, click the link beside the button, which says “Show options”. It expands into a number of options. I recommend choosing for “How often”: At most once a day; for “Language”: English; for “Region”: Any region; for “How many”: All results; the “Deliver to” should show your email address.

Now click the “Create Alert” button and your alert is created.

I recommend enclosing your search query in double quotation marks.

Alerts are useful for unusual names and phrases. Although you can set up an alert for “John Hall”, you’ll get far too many results.

So, last week, Google Alerts sent me an email alert for “Aristide Blank”.

It showed just one new result, a website named Royals Blue, which provides users with news and videos from the entertainment industry; the sort of website that I would never be likely to see.

The alert was to a new article about pianist, Cella Delavrancea, who after divorcing her first husband, married Aristide Blank.

A Wikipedia article about her links to a fairly new Wikipedia article about Aristide, which has provided me with a lot of new information: names of children, jobs, other spouses and a very detailed family history.