In a previous post, I had written about the reasons for creating a family history website, custom tailored to the stories of your ancestors and relatives. In my case, it was a way to document these stories, as well as keep my "known" relatives up to speed with all the findings of my research.

In addition it has been extremely helpful in "attracting" unknown relatives, those individuals, who via a Google or other search had found my site and reached out to me with the suspicion that we indeed were related.  This has been the best benefit of the site, in my opinion.

Another reason, is that those who find the site may not be related, but can create a connection that might result in additional information that is not necessarily a new "named" ancestor or relative.

Let me share a recent example:

About a year ago, at my Family History website, I had posted a story of "Four Generations of Bicycle Shops", which recalls the history of Carl Hart Bicycles.  In the story I had written that Carl Braunhart, my first cousin three times removed, had started a bicycle shop in Schubin,Germany (now Szubin, Poland) around 1913.  The history of that shop includes Carl's move of the shop to Berlin, and after he immigrated to New York City, he started the shop in Brooklyn.  He changed his last name to Hart and the shop was passed down to his son and later his grandson. The shop now resides in Middle Island, New York, having been sold to a non-family member.

Included in the post were photos of the Schubin shop, as well as the Berlin, Brooklyn and the current Middle Island shop.  Above is the photo of the original shop.

I recently received an email from a man who lives in Szubin, Poland, who happened to be doing a search for Szubin and saw the photo on my website. This gentleman was interested in Szubin history and more importantly, photos from "old" Szubin. He shared with me a photo of that same building as it exists today.  

In addition, he contacted the local Szubin Historical Society and library, and I am working with them to see if there is any historical data that may still exist regarding Schubin in the late 1800's up to the 1920's.  That may be doubtful because of the war but its worth a try.

So simply posting seemingly innocuous photos may prove very fruitful to your search!

Everybody uses or has used Google, right? Basically you enter some search terms and through Google's magic - a great number of results are almost immediately displayed.

But Google is an often lightly used platform for doing family history research, or as I like to call it - ancestor hunting. I don't know why that is - but it is likely that hunters are not using some more advanced search techniques. These techniques are not complicated, but a good understanding of them will make using Google and the resultant search results much more palatable and useful in the search for ancestors.

This article focuses on some of these search techniques and also offers some hints into some of Google's lesser known databases, three of which, Books, Scholar, and Patents have been tremendously helpful to me in filling out the stories of my ancestor's lives.

The following search techniques can be accessed via Advanced Search. Or after you complete a search, on the results page a gear symbol will appear in the upper right. Click on that and one of the drop down options will be "Advanced Search." Select that and you can perform the advanced techniques described in the remainder of this article using that page.

But you can easily accomplish the same results using the standard Google search box. The following are some standard advanced techniques:

Exact Phrase Search
If you are searching for the exact spelling of a certain ancestor "target" - this is useful. For example if the person's name is Frederick A Martin and you wish to exclude all the Frederick Martin's without a middle initial or with a different middle initial than "A", then enclose the name in quotes - "Frederick A Martin". Please be aware that this will likely exclude a great number of results but could allow you to hone in on your specific target.

Exclude Words
If you often search a certain surname and if it is a unique one, then you might have one ancestor that "monopolizes" the results. For example, one of my ancestor surnames is Braunhart. Specifically the most famous Braunhart was Samuel, a prominent politician in San Francisco in the late 19th century. When I search for the name Braunhart, well over 60% of the results are for him. If I am not searching for him, or other Braunharts, I could exclude his results by entering Braunhart -Samuel. Make sure to have a space after the first word and place the minus sign directly in front of the surname in this case.

Another example might be a person with a more common name. Let's say your target (for example Frederick Martin) lived in Kansas, but a person with the same name lived in Minnesota. If you wanted to exclude many of the results for the Minnesota Frederick Martin, you could enter Frederick Martin -Minnesota and that would likely exclude many of the results for the Minnesota Frederick Martin.

You can also string multiple exclusions - for example Frederick Martin -Minnesota - teacher if without the exclusions you happened to get a number of results for a teacher who was not your target. This is actually quite an easy and useful search technique. Play with it and you will be happy with the results.

The OR operator
By definition Google searches assume a Boolean "AND" operation. This means that If you enter Frederick Martin the assumption is that you are searching for web pages that have the word Frederick and the word Martin in them. This is the default Google search.

But what if you had an uncommon surname and the spelling differs, or you suspect the spelling differs, for example Martinstine or Martinstein. In your search parameters you would enter Martinstine OR Martinstein. In this case, Google would return all search results with either of those surnames in a webpage. I know in my ancestry, many of my ancestors had different spellings of their surname, for example Heyman or Heymann;or Braunhart or Braunhardt. In these cases I would use the "OR" operator to find webpages with wither of the different spellings.

Site Search
If you know (or suspect) that your target is represented in a specific page or domain, you can use a site search. For example, my ancestor Samuel Braunhart spent a lot of his life in San Francisco. A quite useful site for San Francisco family history search is San Francisco Genealogy. Although this particular site does have a built in search engine, let's pretend that it does not. As you well know, many websites do not. To find the aforementioned Mr. Braunhart at that site, in the search box we would enter site:www.sfgenealogy.com Braunhart and it would return all the pages within their site that has his name in it. So it is quite easy - just enter "site:" followed by the url, a space and then the search term. Try my example and you will see how it works.

Language Search
If you are like at least half of the people in the world, and especially in America, your ancestors were immigrants, which means that they came from another country. Likely you will be faced with search results in a different language. If you speak the language, you might want to exclude the English results for example, or you might want to exclude the non-English language results. In any case, you have the option to narrow results for any specific language by using the Language option in Advanced search. Again, the way to perform an Advanced search is as follows: enter the url www.google.com/advanced_search. Or after you complete a search, on the results page a gear symbol will appear in the upper right. Click on that and one of the drop down options will be "Advanced Search."

Then you can narrow the results by selecting the appropriate language in the Language drop down.

Google over the years has accumulated and scanned literally millions of books, scholarly articles and patent information. In each case, by searching these databases I have found references to several of my ancestors.

Google Books
Google has scanned over 20 million books and applied Optical Character Recognition techniques to make them searchable. Because of copyright issues and the like, not all of the books that have been scanned are displayable after finding a book with one of your searches of this database. It is quite simple to search the Google Books database. Enterwww.books.google.com and the interface will be presented to you. Enter the word(s) you wish to search and voila - all the books that contain your search parameters will be revealed to you.

There are three types of display of your search results after you select one. Full View allows you to see all the pages of the book. Preview allows you to see selected full pages of the book. And Snippet only allows you to see 2 or 3 lines on the page that your search phrase resides. So depending on your need to see specific pages, you may have to seek a library that houses the entire book. Again in my case there were some of each of the views that applied to searches for my ancestors and their appearance in the books in the Google database.

Please note that the advanced search techniques written in this article also apply to your search of the Google books database.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar focuses on journals and other scholarly works. Again - all the advanced search techniques mentioned previously can be used. The results, as in using the Books database, may limit what can be displayed. In some cases you might be able to view entire pages of what you are seeking; in others, you may be sent to external databases where the previews are either limited, or you must pay a fee to download the document. The scholar database can be accessed by entering the url www.scholar.google.com

Google Patents
Over 8 million U.S. patents are included in this database, and as of August, 2012, some European patents have been added. This database has been quite useful to me, as 4 of my ancestors have registered patents in this database. These make for interesting stories to add color to your family history research. Again, the same advanced search techniques can be used to search the Patent database. The patents database can be accessed by entering the url www.patents.google.com

One of the best research tools that will help you find other family members (living, of course) is to create a personalized Family History website. I did so about 3 years ago, and posted photos, family stories, articles in the newspaper, etc.












​There are four VERY good reasons to create such a website:

• It is fun.

• It enables you to document interesting family stories and photos that will be preserved for future generations (as long as the website remains active).

• It is a way to keep your relatives involved in what's happening with your research and enables you a way to share your discoveries.

• By having it on the Internet, it is a terrific way to find other relatives. This is often called "cousin hunting" or "cousin bait"

An excellent example of the positive results of having a family history website is as follows:.

During years of research prior to 2009, I had found several people with the last name of "Braunhart". At the time, I called them "stragglers", because I did not know how they were related to me.

Only because of placing their names on my family history website, in the past two years I have found two remote cousins who were able to connect the stragglers to my family.

The first, a woman who lives in New Jersey, is the great granddaughter of Alexander Braunhart, who was the younger brother of my great great grandmother Sara Braunhart Bernstein. As it turns out - all of the "stragglers" were either sons, daughters or grandchildren of Alexander. The puzzle pieces now fit!

The second, who lives in Berlin, was the great granddaughter of Alexander, and her grandfather, Philipp, who stayed in Berlin while many of his brothers and sisters emigrated to America. All of his ancestors remained in Berlin. I now had a connection in Germany. What a great surprise!

This happened ONLY because I had created a family history website and they had Googled the name Braunhart and found the site. They submitted comments on one of the posts and I was able to connect with them.

THESE CONNECTIONS WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED IF I HAD NOT SHARED MY RESEARCH AND FAMILY STORIES ON MY WEBSITE.

They are now the most prolific providers of information to the family history, and I appreciate them both very much.

So start a family history website - it's easy and will produce many wonderful results, I guarantee it.

So, now it is time to get started building your family history website. You probably don't want to pay to host your site and the good news is that you don't have to. The most important decision on who to host is to make sure that they have a blogging capability. And this is because your family history should be presented as stories about a person, or about an event or activity in the lives of your ancestors - and blog posts are the best way to present those.

I personally have used Google's Blogger and Weebly for two of my sites - but there are many others. Word Press is quite popular. I will not engage in a discussion of the pros and cons of each. But the following are links to discussion of the pros and cons of free hosting sites. You can read these yourself and draw your own conclusions:

• 7 Best Online Website Builders To Create Free Websites - Opensource, Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers
• 15 Best Free Website Builders - It's become very popular nowadays to use website builders to create your own website
• 12 Best Online Website Builders To Create Free Websites - 12 Best Online Website Builders To Create Free Websites
• 45 Web Builders to Create an Insanely Awesome Free Website - Become A Better Web Designer!
  

Okay - now you have selected the company that will host your free site. It is now time to start building your site. I have two example sites that are for my family that you can browse through to get some ideas.

The first site I have entitled "Braunhart Mania". It contains stories and many other documents, photos, and artifacts that the reader can access. I built it using the Weebly platform, and right now I find it to be the easiest by far to use.

It is located at Braunhart Mania

Go through the site and you can get some ideas as to what to include in your site. In another article I will be discussing the components of a successful family history website.

If you have chosen weebly as your platform, I would highly recommend visiting YouTube and watching these free videos. Although they are geared to a Weebly based site - there are lots of great ideas in them and if you choose Weebly as your platform, you can't find a better tutorial.

Building a Family History Website Using Weebly

Another one of my other family history websites can be found below. Please browse around it to get some ideas. It is based on the Google Blogger platform.

Marksology

You now have the reasons to build your family history website; and you have some platforms to build it on, and some examples of what should be included.

I will be writing further articles that go further in depth as to what components should be added to make your family history website attractive, alive, and popular!

So get started and have fun.