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Search Engines and Surnames
An e-mail letter to members of the Rootsweb Mailing List by Mark Tonn
Reproduced with his permission.
Dear Rooters,
I would like to suggest a helpful tool for you in your quest to find information on your
various families. I have yet to see this pointed out in the years I have enjoyed reading
the ROOTSWEB files, and it may very well have been suggested already, so I apologize if
you have seen this before.
With the increased possibilities of the Internet, along with the speed and accuracy of so
many search engines, (I.E. Yahoo, Hotbot, Northern Light, etc), it became apparent to me
we could use this medium as a tool to search even the most remote articles and documents
pertaining to our families. Now we have all used them to a certain degree to find items
such as the history of a town or to find addresses of people with the same last name as
our own. But have you ever thought of plugging in a surname in a search engine to see what
comes up?
You will be pleasantly surprised at what is out there on the web that contains the very
surname you are searching for! These documents are often not in any library or family
history center, although the are most likely on printed material unbeknownst to most
people. If you are interested in family history other than just dates and names, like I
am, you can find valuable data. To give you an example...........
I take a reliable search engine, like Alltheweb.com or NorthernLight.com, (But you can use
them all, as some search HTML and Internet files in different locations.) and start with
my most unusual surname, in this case HANSCHKA. You can use more common surnames, but you
will take the chance of getting millions (literally!) of pages of documents if you use
names like my Grandma HEAD. Plugging in HANSCHKA reveals a host of various documents with
that name somewhere in the document. I see that some have to do with distant cousins and
their published works from their professional job or they might be simply remarks made in
a hobby chat room. But sometimes you can get lucky, like I did, and find an obscure
document that I would never had see or known about if not for the power of the Internet.
Briefly, my HANSCHKA family came from New Jersey or lived most of their lives there. I
have numerous HANSCHKA ancestors with no marriage record, yet when I plugged the surname
in, I came up with a marriage record of an EDNA HANSCHKA (one of mine) and JOSEPH DOYLE,
in of all places of WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NEW YORK! I would have never thought to even
venture into New York, let alone Westchester County to search for any HANSCHKAS. Yet this
is what a search engines can do.
I would encourage those to start off with unusual surnames at first to see how it works.
Then, as you get good at it and filter through the less valuable minutiae of data, you
will begin to notice what might be a worthy document to view. Many, if not all search
engines let you play with the search options. Many accept Boolean characters, which will
enable you to define your search to specific places or words. By typing in the surname
FICK and the state COLORADO with the (+ ) sign between them, I got a nice little news
article from the 1920's about one of my own ancestors.
Be creative when dealing with more common surnames and link them with states or towns or
??? Heed the following to ensure you get what you want:
1. Quotations (" ") around your words and phrases will get you exactly that
phrase or words. It is possibly the single most filter you will use.
2.Plus (+) and minus (-) signs in front of words will make sure that either that word WILL
appear, in the case of (+), or that it WILL NOT appear, in the case of (-) in that
document.
3. The asterisk (*) is valuable to enable the search engine to retrieve documents if you
are not sure of the spelling, I.E. Barth* will get you Bartholomew, Bartholamew, or Barth,
etc.
4. The words AND, OR, NOT can also be used to make your search more productive.
In any case, be sure to read the instructions about power searches when you use your own
search engine. And be sure to use more than one. They are not the same! I am sorry to be
so long winded, but if it helps anyone in finding those clues that are missing from a
troublesome branch of their tree, then all the better. If you do find something useful,
then show your appreciation by supporting ROOTSWEB, won't you?
Mark Tonn
Back to "Finding Surnames by using Simple Search Engine
Techniques"
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