Genealogy Chat

I wondered what names cause others problems on searching. The three worst in my family research are HEARD, QUICK and SIMM. Heard and Quick bring up thousands of results where the word is used in normal sentences and Simm returns loads of computer software sites! Quick being a particular pain as most entries even on genealgy sites mention a 'quick' search or something. Karen

My line is Holden, which was frequently mistranscribed as Holding ...when I search I get everyone who has ever held a meeting, or a bunch of flowers, or a party, or a piece of land! GRRRRR. Marjorie

Hi Karen Do you mean when you're Googling? Now I read something somewhere on searching and I think it said to do something like put the name in " ". EG. "Quick" genealogy. I think I read it in one of my Family Tree mags so I'll see if I can find it. Jeanette x

Jeanette - its not only when googling, even if you have a web page on genealogy like say the Herts family site, if you search you get every instance of 'Quick' etc. Inverted commas do help to narrow it down though! - Karen

Marjorie - so glad I'm not the only one getting frustrated, there must be loads worse tho! - Karen

karen my maiden name was KEEP if i google i get every possible sentence with the word "keep"in it lol susie

Putting a single word in quotation marks achieves absolutely nothing on Google. Quotation marks are use to "tie together" a sequence of words to avoid "hits" on the individual words. eg quick genealogy - 2,520,000 "quick" genealogy - 2,520,000 quick family genealogy - 1,310,000 "quick family" genealogy - 5,420

Susie - thats a bad one! Geoff - you are right, I remembered that using inverted commas only helps when you search on a Christian name too. Maybe we could do a case sensitive search somehow?

I have Church and that is really hard to google!

Hi Karen, I just did a test search , entering = surname "quick" . pleased to say it works and brings up genealogy sites. Yours Jane

I have a friend whose surname is Tree. I couldn't work out the best way to search for his ancesters. Try typing in 'Tree family tree' - terrible!!

Some of those sound bad esp Tree! I have Aked which google asks me "do you mean naked?" !! Also get loads of misspellings for "asked". Anne

You should all be so lucky....I have a HUBERSLEY/ HUBBERSLY or which ever way you spell it....there is only one that I can find anywhere....and that is mine....I am beginning to think she just evolved and was never born!!!!!! And there is only the one in this site....mine. How do you research that?????

My maiden name is KEY - try googling that!

Anne According to the ONS names index http://www.taliesin-arlein.net/names/search.php there are no Hubbersly or Hubersley living in the UK. So a pretty rare bird. dave

Sheleen LOL!!

One of my grandparent's surnames was Corner - so you get Cnr of this Street etc. Christine

One of my family tree names is Christmas... There's also Frost... (they married!); and Booth, War(r), Foster. On my husband's side is Ruse, Coke, Bar(r)on, not to mention our surname now! Placenames can be a pain for family searches too: Lancaster, Devonshire, Stratford... By the way, the inverted commas thing is that whatever you put between inverted commas is treated as a single item. For example, if I search on: Christine Cocks, it'll find every site which mentions both Christine & Cocks, whether or not adjacently; if I search on: "Christine Cocks", it will find only those sites which have that name, that way round. I might also want to search on "Cocks Christine" in case there's a list with surnames first. It still seems to ignore any punctuation. Christine

Tips for using Google in Genealogy searchs can be found here: http://www(.)searchforancestors(.)com/archives/google.html Hope this is of some help! Barbara