Are you ready to Google? I can't hear you. Yes! Yes. We are going to reconstruct your ancestors world with Google. I am Lisa Louise Cooke, and I'm the host of the Genealogy Gems Podcast. Anybody a podcast listener? Yay. Hey, folks, if you have a smartphone, you can listen to the podcast, so check it out. We have an app, and we do all kinds of stuff over at GeneologyGems.com to help you find your family history and your family tree. Now, I've been doing that since about 2007, and that's something that you probably know about me. I also have kind of gotten the label of the Google guru because I've written a book called The Genealogist's Google Toolbox. And, in fact, it has evolved so quickly in technology I've written a whole new version, the second edition of the book. And that book was originally going to be all about Search because we all go to google.com. And then I start to discover there's all these other tools in Google, and it's really a toolbox; it isn't just a search engine. But there might be a couple of things that you don't know about me.

[MUSIC STARTS] I love to cake decorate. And these are cakes I've made over the years for my kids, for my grandkids. It all started back when I was first pregnant with my first child, going out of my mind with worry and weight. And I took a cake decorating class. You got to have a Minion cake for my grandson, right? Hannah was a softball player, so I had to have a softball mitt. I love making these, and the funny thing about cake decorating is that it doesn't require as much skill and talent as you might think. [MUSIC STOPS] What it requires is good tools. If you have tips and couplers and bags and that kind of stuff, even with a little bit of shake in the hands, you can still look like you really know what you're doing. And it's a lot of fun. In fact, for my birthday one year, my husband got me a candy apple red KitchenAid mixer with all of the attachments. [CELESTIAL SINGING] It was the pinnacle of what I desired for my cake decorating. And, in fact, this machine, while it looks like just a humble little mixer, actually, of course, mixes up the dough. And it's got a great paddle for whipping that frosting the way I needed. But it also comes with a bread hook so that you can really knead dough right there. And it will juice, and you can put in grains, and you can make pasta, and not just the curly kind. It makes the really long kind. And oh my gosh, you can do so many things with a KitchenAid mixer. It's absolutely amazing. I love it.

Uh, Lisa, not everything can be made with a KitchenAid mixer. It can't be? But the right tool does mean that you can spend less time mixing and more time enjoying your family. And while I love to cook and I love to bake, I love my family more. And I want to be able to spend time with them. So having the right tool opened up a world of baking to me. And, actually, a small business for a time. I did wedding cakes for about five years. But in the genealogy world, I've heard the same things said: not everything is on the internet.

And people say that because they're so afraid that this newfangled thing, which isn't so newfangled anymore, is really exciting. But then people forget about the archives and the libraries. And I got to thinking--you know, I started doing research when I was eight years old along with my grandmother. And I often say I was the only kid in grade school using her allowance for death certificates.

You know--geek. But I can't imagine anybody in my grandmother's day saying, "Now, hold on. Not everything is on microfilm, people." And somehow you feel guilty if you use that newfangled tool that people think you're not the real deal, you're not serious, or you're not doing the comprehensive search. I never said I was going to find everything. I just said there's a lot there, and I want mine, right? Not everything was on microfilm, and yet they used it, and they embraced it, and it's going away because the internet is here to help us. So the first and most important thing to remember in today's session is that the right tools mean less time searching, and that means more time learning about your ancestors. And if a tool like Google can make that happen, and, in fact, if it has this amazing treasure trove toolbox of tools that are free, why would you not use it? And I'm a little bit of a believer in the path of least resistance. I'd rather pay no money and be in bunny slippers and pj's then get in the car and spend money to get the same information. So wouldn't it be nice to get what you can and gain access to? And even then, every search starts online because you don't want to have to get dressed, get in your car, get to the archive, and find out they're closed today. We have to do our homework online to make the best prep for whether we're going to find things offline or online. But today I just want to show you the excitement that I have for reconstructing your ancestors' world using this fabulous tool. So what we're going to do is we're going to identify what you already have. You've got a lot of great stuff to work with. And even if you feel like maybe you're at a bit of a standstill, I'm thinking maybe not. We're going to use Google tools to flesh out more details using what you already have and what you already know. And my goal is by the end, we're going to be able to tell a much richer story, a more complete story. So turning to what I already have, I have this photograph of Marianne Suzannah Munns. And my husband, who--if you've been by our booth, the Genealogy Gems booth, you've seen the silver-haired fox there. That's my husband, and that is his grandfather Raymond Cooke. And Raymond had this photograph of his mother, the only known photograph of Marianne. And I loved dear Raymond, although I never got to meet him. He took the time and handwrote on the back of everything who it was and when it was and the whole thing. I mean, my grandmother didn't do that, but Raymond did. And so, in fact, in addition to the writing on the back of the photographs, he also sat down in his late 80s, early 90s, and he wrote like a 12-page little, quick autobiography. "Here's what I remember. Before I go, I want you to know this about me." Now I've been through this, and if you're fortunate enough to have letters or a little paper or a little biography written up, anything, I really encourage you, sit down and transcribe it and type it up again in Word. I couldn't believe how many things popped up out at me when I did that. But I could have sworn I would have paid attention to, but I didn't until I wrote it myself again. And when you do that, we're going to distill this down by starting to highlight some of the searchables: the words, the places, the people, anything that stands out as somewhat unique that we could use to search further on. And what I ended up with was a distilled bullet point list. And this is just the partial list of searchables, things that I've already got some records on that he's told me something about, but I want to see, what can Google offer me? What else could be on the web? Because what's on the web could be something on your cousin Fred's, on his website, but you've never met him. You don't even know he exists, but he's been scanning his family photo, and it turns out your family is connected. It could be an archive. It could be a volunteer group or genealogy society. It could be a large company. Anybody and everybody is posting information that has the potential to be relevant for you. So I made this list and put in bold the key elements I wanted to search. So let's get going. The first thing I did was put quotation marks around items that I want to make mandatory in my search. And I'm guessing if you've been to Google, you've run some searches and you've ended up with millions and millions of results. And have you noticed that sometimes you'll put in a full name or some names and places--some results have some of it, and some results have other words, and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason, and you don't have much context between the words? By doing the quotation marks around either a single word or phrase, we're going to be able to tell Google, "Look, it's got to be exactly this phrase." So I pulled out Sir David Salomons, who Raymond's father worked for, and Sir David lived on Broomhill Estate, and that's where Harry Cooke worked, and that was in Tunbridge Wells. Also, he mentions that the year just after he was born, his father had told him about this first Horseless Carriage Exhibition that they had had on Broomhill Estate and that Sir David was a real fan and inventor of automobiles and just really pushing that forward. And he was working with some of the European inventors to try to open up this idea in England. And so I know that Raymond was born 1894, and I even have a photograph. See the one on the right? That's Harry standing next to the car, and Sir David is sitting on the left, with a little bowler hat and a little beard. I didn't get that actually from Raymond. I got that on eBay. Your family history is on eBay. And the beauty of it now is that Google is searching eBay and bringing up those results as well. So when I pulled that up and did a quick search on "Horseless Carriage Exhibition," I see Harry standing there next to the car. That car was his responsibility at that event. So we go and we do a search, and I put quotation marks around "Tunbridge Wells" because I don't want Sarah Wells who lived in Tunbridge, Massachusetts, right? I want "Tunbridge Wells" as one phrase spelled exactly that way plus "horseless carriage." Now, I wasn't sure that they would call it an exhibition, an event, a fair, whatever they were going to call it. So I didn't put that word in quotation marks, because I don't want to remove from my results stuff that might be absolutely relevant just because I don't know the right term. So put in what you know is for sure in your quotations. And then I also put "Salomons" in quotation marks. I didn't do "Sir David Salomons," because I don't know if that's even exactly how it will be stated in his name. But I know that the surname is important in the context of this. It brought up dozens and dozens of results. In fact, this article was really neat. It says here, "Motoring, in fact, rather more than 100 years old. Britain's first motor show was the 'Horseless Carriage Exhibition.'" And that was the official title in quotes. It "took place in the autumn of 1895," and instead of the expected 600 cars, five vehicles showed up. And they had to be very careful because they could not break the speed limit of only four miles per hour.

This was just the beginning of the articles that I found that started to tell me the rest of the story that Raymond did not write because he wasn't actually there personally. The Google Search results actually brought a big book result. Now Google Books is something we're going to dig into. That's one of these tools. And it says here in The Hub, this is like 5, 10 years, I think, after the automobile is really revving up, "Thanks to the energy and initiation of Sir David Salomons, the mayor of Tunbridge Wells, an interesting exhibition took place on Thursday, October 15th." This may have even been the same year. I don't have it in front of me here. So David Salomons and his party drove onto the grounds between two and three o'clock in the afternoon. And when the horses had been taken out of his break, Sir David--with a keen sense of humor and probably meaning well, well-merited sarcasm at the British coach trade--had a board fixed to his carriage, and it said Horseless Carriage of English Manufacture. This whole article goes into somebody who was there who tells the minute-by-minute event and what was happening. So even if it doesn't name Harry by name, it's really like getting a first-hand account. And these books have been scanned and digitized in Google Books. They've been OCRed with optical character recognition so they're searchable. And that's how Google found it. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to get some stuff out of our general searches that we don't want. We're going to do that with the minus sign. So we want to remove the words and the phrases that keep getting in the way. Have you noticed you're getting results, and there's all kinds of stuff that just has nothing to do with what you want? You can literally subtract them. Here's an example. Windover was the company that Harry went to work for. He was a coach builder. He started as a blacksmith, became a coach builder, and eventually-- because he's working for Sir David-- he works on the first automobiles in England. So I put "carriage" in quotation marks and "Windover" because I want to learn more about this company that Harry worked for. And I put "Huntingdon" because I knew they had a couple of different locations. Huntington is a little further North. I got 42,400 results. That's actually small these days, with as much content as on the web. But still, what I found was that there's a lot of references to Huntingdon, Canada. And that is not anything to do with what I'm looking for. So I just went back in, subtracted "Canada," and now I'm at 17,000. But more importantly, everything on the home page, that first page of results, is all right on target. It's mentioning Windover at the coach building company. It's talking about Huntingdon, which is in Huntingdonshire, England. And I've moved Canada out of the way. But most importantly, I found lots and lots of goodies here. Windover Carriage Works in George Street, Huntingdon--there's a whole article here about the history of it, where it was located. There's even like part of an engraving on there to look at. I'll show you more about the images I found. If you're not sure what some of the words are and you want to use quotation marks, you can use an asterisk. So just remember that this is an option. Google doesn't do a character wild card. Maybe you've done that at Ancestry's search engine, where you can put a question mark in the place of a letter when you're not sure about the spelling. It doesn't do that, but it can use an asterisk and say, "I'll just stand here, and I'll be here in case there is a word in between these two words or the word is a variable and you're just not sure what it is." So you can use the asterisk to replace words or an initial, maybe a middle initial in a name, and then still have quotation marks around it. So if I was going to search for Harry, I would put "Harry Cooke," but I'd put an asterisk in between. I still want quotation marks around it, because I don't want Harry and John and so-and-so and all these different Cookes with an "e" and without an "e," which we always get. So the asterisk says it might have Raymond in the middle. It might have R in the middle. It might not have anything. The final other piece of the puzzle and kind of how I want you to talk to Google to get what you want--because I really want you to be successful, to find what you need--is the numbering search. So you can add these number searches, which if you think about it, what's the year? It's a four digit number--2017, 2018, 1895. So you can use this to say, "Not only do I want these words, but I want a page to have a year that falls within the same time frame that I'm searching." Wouldn't that make a difference, than ending up with a whole bunch of web pages that were all 21st century? So here I did "Horseless Carriage Exhibition" in quotes. I did "Tunbridge" in quotes, and then I have "1893 .. 1896," no spaces. And this is in your handout. You want to go home and you want to play with this, because you're going to be amazed at how dramatically it changes the landscape of your results. When I did this, I was originally searching for websites. But I could not help but notice some of the images that were down there. So rather than being in web results, which is where it says "All" at the top, next to the arrow, I clicked Images, and this photo popped up. Now I've never come across this before, but it's been a little while since I've run this search. This is Harry, again. Now first, I thought, "Oh, they just flipped the picture." No, they didn't. Actually, if you look at the angles of the nose and the ears--and you also notice this guy is gone in the other picture. So think of it, more and more pictures coming out of the woodwork, photographs coming out of albums, and making it onto the web. I'll take any picture of Harry I can get, because I can count them on one hand. So pretty cool. Now, I want you to be able to multiply all of this searching. Before we go into the rest of the toolbox--which everything we just did in this first 15 minutes is going to be applicable because those search operators not only can do their work at google.com, but they can do it in all the other tools--I want you to be able to multiply your results with Google Alerts. How many of you are using Google Alerts? Oh, not enough hands. Okay, so how many of you think you have a free Google account, like a Gmail account, YouTube, something like that? Okay, well, the rest of you are going to be up tonight because you got to get yourself a Google account. It's free and here's why. You're going to go to google.com/alerts, and you are going to take the search that you ran, particularly those that are doing a good job, right? Because guess what? Tomorrow you need to search again. And then the next day, you need to search it again. Because every day, every minute of every day, somebody is uploading something. Oh no, this is going to eliminate all the sticky notes around the monitor of your computer screen because you no longer have to keep track of what you have searched for. You are going to copy it and paste it into the search box at Google Alerts. And you're going to click that Create Alert button, and Google Alerts is going to run this search 24 hours a day, seven days a week, forever, until you tell it to stop. You just got yourself a free personal genealogy research assistant. You're welcome.

And the thing about this is you can have up to 1,000 of them. And the good news is it's not going to keep giving you all 20,000 results. It's going to tell you, "Here's what's new or updated since the last time you searched." Perfect! And if you start seeing results that are coming in and you're like, "This is not on target," don't just get rid of it. Go back and tweak it. Every good search, and if you've sat through my full-length methodology class on Google, a good search is multiple times. It is not a slot machine. You don't put it in, pull the trigger, and hope for the best. You run it multiple times because you're going to learn from the results what's working and what's not. And then you're going to subtract stuff out. You're going to add years. You're going to change up words. But this is going to make such a difference. I feel like it's Christmas every day when I open my inbox and I see what Google has found. And I want to change your thinking. Because when you think about Ancestry, one of the more powerful tools, and MyHeritage and other ones that are getting the hinting, isn't it really amazing how the hinting can find things and uses the data off your tree? This is the hinting for the rest of the web. It is. This is you setting it up, saying you now have shaky leaves for all the other websites that don't have that functionality. Let's talk about Image Search. I love the pictures. Image Search provides really a more targeted search specifically for any kind of imagery, all types of images. And we'll talk about some of the specifics. And it doesn't matter where they are. The limitations? They can't be behind a paid-subscription wall, a password-protected wall. That's pretty much it. So it's going to be able to find any image on a website. So it's a little bit hidden. You're going to go to Google.com, but up there by your smiling face, you'll see an Images link. And if you'd like to just get focused on Image Search and not do it through the whole main search, go up there and click Images. And you get this special little images search box. I'm going to search for "Windover" in quotes, "carriage," and "Huntingdon."

And look at our results. A couple of these--I love seeing the kinds of things that he built, but this caught my eye because I remember the article that I saw, and it had a half a page. And it looked like a black-and-white engraving. Here's the original. This original back from the mid-19th century is a drawing of downtown Huntingdon, where Harry worked, and the Windover factory. So I just loved this. Look at this one more close. I mean, I've gone from Raymond's words and telling me what little he knew about it to feeling like I'm kind of visually being able to walk through that town and see, where did he go to work? What did it look like? Now, it can search--when it's searching, how does it find these? How do you know you're going to get good results? I didn't go real in-depth into all the pictures I got there, but almost all of them were very, very relevant. So what Google has the ability to do is it can search for photos and images by the key words in the file name. Have you ever added metadata to your images? You can actually go into the image and add keywords and that kind of thing. I suggest it; it's a good strategy to use. Well, if anybody has done that--and I, as a website user, I always put the keywords that are most relevant to my blog article and my image into my image itself. It also looks at the link text pointing to the image. So sometimes, like in that case, the window or image--there was a web page with a link, and it said, "Click here to see the original engraving." And that is the information. Those are the words that Google is also paying attention to. What is it saying in the tax that goes to the image that could help me know that this is the right one? And then it also looks at the text around the image. So it's getting smarter and smarter about understanding the context of content on the web. And this means that it can look around it and say, "Well, considering the conversation around this image, I think I even have a better idea of what it's about and why I should deliver it to you." So remember that minus search that we did? So here is "Windover," "carriage," "Huntingdon," with about 40,000. We took out the Canada; we got down to 17,000. If I just go and click the image link, it shows me the version--all in pictures, all the results of those web pages. And it's not limited to photographs: maps, drawings, engravings, paintings, old postcards--I have found so many old postcards of the street and the house where ancestors lived. You know, that was a very popular thing to do--clip art, all kinds of great imagery. So what have I found? Well, I found Brampton, where Harry was born. I found pictures of the little village. I got Hinchingbrooke House, where he first started forging gates as a blacksmith. I got Huntingdon Bridge and into Huntingdon, where the story was that his wife, Marianne, heard of the job at Windover, and she went running across the bridge into town to tell Harry about this new work opportunity. And then when they got to Tunbridge Wells, Raymond, at a young age, started to play the violin. And he became quite good. And they lived just around the corner from the brand new opera house in Tunbridge Wells. And, in fact, he talks about that his mother used to rent rooms to the actors and to the musicians. So I wanted to see, what does the Tunbridge Wells opera house look like? So lots and lots there. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Lisa, copyright." So let's talk about that for a second. The usage of each image varies with each image, okay? You got to do your due diligence. Check the image itself: Is there a notation under it, typically in the caption, about the copyright and usage? Is there a link to a copyright page? If not, do a little bit of snooping in the website to check, or check and contact the owner directly. If there's an image you have any question about, ask them, "Could I have your permission?" And let them know in what way you might reuse it. You could also visit copyright.gov for guidance. This is a great website resource for helping you kind of walk the minefield of what you can use and what you can't. But I'd like to show you something that's built right into Google. There's a tools button, and it will give you a filter for usage rights. So here we're going to click Tools. Now, you have to run the search first. Once you run the search, you'll see the button. And when you click Tools, the secondary menu pops down, and there's usage rights. Now, unfortunately, not every image has this attached to it. They haven't designated what the rights are. But if you're in a quick hurry, and you just need to grab something that you can feel pretty confident about, this will capture anybody who has marked their image as something that you can use, whether it's commercial use, personal use, or whether they will allow you to even change it or alter it. So there's lots of things that you can do to check that. I'd like to show you a little hidden gem. We're going to go into Google and type in a search. Here's all our search results. I can even see the picture that I uploaded that I own, the photograph. We're going to go to All. This is our web results. And there's the image link. Now, that's "Tunbridge Wells" "Horseless Carriage Exhibition." But I'm going to click the Tools button, and I'm going to go to Type. And if you just click Photos, now every result is a photograph. You can also go and you can change to just black and white. Or how about time frame? Let's do a custom range search. It gives you a little calendar, or you can just go in and you could type in the date. You can pick from the counter if it's more recent. But if we're back in the time frame that I'm researching, I'm going to type it in there.

So this says, in the last 12 months what, are the results? So if you run this search in a while and you just want to see what's new since the last time you ran, and you didn't have Google Alerts before, you could narrow it way down to just what's new. So here's that photo that we found. Here's another version. Harry is not in this one. Looks very similar, doesn't it?

And, of course, you can click through to the website. Where does this come from? Well, it comes from this site, which talks about the area and the history of automobiles in that area. It's amazing the bits and pieces and all the different sources that they come from. And the people who have interest--you know, these people are not into genealogy, but they've got information and photos that really are what I'm looking for. I also want to show you another little bonus tip. Now, you can upload your own photos. So we're going to go directly to Image Search, and you see that we're going to do a search on "Tunbridge Wells." Here's what it looks like. These do not look all that old, do they? And I'm looking for a time frame. Now, I could try to specify a time frame, but let's go back. You can click the camera icon, and you can upload a photograph from your computer. If you've ever gotten an old historic postcard--I've done this a couple of times: "What is this place?"--upload it and let Google tell you, because it will search the web, and it will find it. So I'm going to upload the photograph of the Horseless Carriage Exhibition. Now, at this point in time, what we're getting are old photos with the same sepia tone look with a lot of wheels in them--right?--because it spotted those wheels. Now, let's go back. How could I get Tunbridge Wells? Just replace the word "vintage car" with "Tunbridge Wells." I'm using my old photo to tell Google what's the look, the time frame, the type of photo. Now instead of doing "Tunbridge Wells" and getting lots of modern-day pictures, they're all old. They're all from past years, and I recognize--I've been searching this area long enough that I recognize some of the places and the buildings and that type of thing. So you can use this Image Search to give Google the look of the photo you're looking and then apply it. Yes.

She's asking, "Does that put it on Google, your picture, or is it just comparing it?" To the best of my knowledge, it's just comparing it. It's not hosting it on a page somewhere for someone else to get. Yes.

And, of course, some of these led to these terrific websites. This was kind of fun. I know it doesn't really add anything to my family history, but there were so many things on here. Have you ever had a BSO moment? You know, those bright, shiny objects? You're going to find so many on these sites. Yes. How did you figure out that that was Harry in the picture?

He asked, "How did I figure out that that was Harry in the photo on eBay?" Because I have two other photos of him. I also know he was at the event, and I know he was in charge of the cars. And it looks just like him. I can't say 100 percent-- You didn't learn that off of Google? I didn't learn off of Google. Actually, eBay did not say who the person was. It said who David Salomons was. And it said it was the Tunbridge Wells horseless carriage. So he was asking me, "Would Google tell me, 'Oh, that's Harry there'?" Give them five years, I'm thinking. Same thing. I think it will not be that long before you could upload a portrait of a person and it would tell you, "Here's that person." But what it can tell you, and this works for more well-known people and well-known places, if it's something where there's multiple pictures out there on the web of that individual--like, I upload a picture of Colin Firth. Oh yeah, it found Colin Firth. It knew who he was. It told me all about him. And same thing with some of these old castles in England--it actually identified it for me, which explained why it was in the scrapbook that I had, so it's getting there. Okay, let's switch to Google Books because I have gathered a lot of really cool imagery that's going to build my story. In 2010 it was estimated there were 130 million book titles worldwide. And Google's goal was just to scan them all. Okay, I'm all for that. That would be amazing. Well, in 2015 they had hit 25 million. Now, oftentimes people--I want an answer, honest answer; we're just friends. How many of you regularly use Google Books for your family history? A good handful of you. Many more of you maybe haven't, maybe heard about it, maybe tried it once. I often tell people this way. If you move to a new neighborhood, and your neighbor came over and said, "Oh, hi. I'm Mary. So nice to see you. I hope you'll come over and have tea. I've got 25 million books in my house, and they're all historic. All the old books are scanned and searchable." You'd be like, "I'm moving in." So it's a big deal. There is something there for everybody. And they have the OCR applied, which, of course, makes them searchable. So what could I find? Well, I don't know as much about Marianne Susannah Munns, Raymond's mom. So I went to Google Books specifically, and I looked for the name of her father, who is named in this biography that Raymond has written. Reverend John William Munns. I didn't put it in quotes, because you can imagine--you get into four words, like that now. It could have been Reverend Munns, John W., you know. I don't want to be that exact; I just wanted to see what it would come up with. Google Books found 21,000 books mentioning a John Munns. The good news is it's going to put the ones that match the closest towards the top, the ones where it's John William Munns, right? If I go in and put quotation marks around it, there's two. There are two directories, post office directory of Birmingham. Birmingham? Now, I knew he was from Huntingdonshire, and I knew that he lived part time in Tunbridge Wells with Harry when he moved there. I clicked through. This must be wrong. No, it's not. Have you ever had an ancestor who just seems to drop off the face of the earth for about 10 years? You're like, "Where did you go?" Go ask Google Books where they went, because they can't hide there. All these books, particularly the ones prior to 1923, those are out of copyright, typically in the public domain. Those got scanned. Those have been OCRed. It tells me that he bought Smethwick House, and he opened a girls' school for three years up in Birmingham. This was really cool. So of course, I had to stop and go back to Google. And I did "Smethwick Hall," which is the house that he bought, and I just put in the last name "Munns," did them all in quotation marks to make them exact. And there are pictures. There's the directory in Google Books, our schools and colleges, Smethwick and other estates. He's mentioned in the local archive records of Smethwick House. And here's one here naming him Mr. Munns, a Baptist minister. That's my guy, eventually bought the school, which he ran until the 1880s. And it gives all the history before and after. I now have it on my bucket list. I need to get back to England because I need to go in person. I've been looking through their catalog. I think they may have some photographs of him. Yes. Does it have to be deceased? Can you do living as well? Absolutely. She says, "Does it have to be a deceased person, or can it be living?" Unlike as in Ancestry, where they'll put living as the person, Google Books isn't going to work with that. It's only concerned with the copyright issue of the book in its entirety. So if the book is out of copyright in the public domain or they've had permission given, then it's searched, and whether there's a living person still named, they don't do anything. There's no redaction that I know of. Yeah. So it's an amazing resource, and listen to the podcast. I have video classes just on Google Books. There's tons and tons there, really for everybody. You do not have to be famous to get mentioned in books. Here's a little gem. I call it the thumbnail search. You can find images faster in Google Books, because finding great stuff is great unless it starts taking hours and hours and hours and hours. Because we don't want to eat up your time, we're trying to save you time and get you better results. You can find maps photographs, engravings, artwork. What we're going to do is we're going to begin with a keyword search.

So I'm going to put in "Huntingdon," and then I'm going to do "Windover" in quotation marks. Click Search. Now, once we find a book that we know is on target and it's talking about what we want--here's one, Huntington, but there's a lot of them here--I'm going to click Tools. I want to go to Any books, Free Google eBooks. If you don't want to have to weed through the books that turned out aren't digitized, and those are such a disappointment, just do Tools, Any books, Free eBooks. Now you're only looking at search results for books that have been OCRed and that you can work with. So I'm going to go in here, put in a time frame. I specified the time frame with my custom time search, and we're going to click this one. And you see how it actually put a yellow highlight on Huntington. That was one of the things I searched for. And there's Windover. I'm going to clear the search. Now, once you go and you find something, you can clip this. So click the little scissor button, draw a box around it, and you can copy the address. It has now made an image for you, a clipping, and it's assigned it its own page. If I were to go to a new browser tab, I could paste it, hit enter, and there's my image. Once you have a nice clean image, now I can right-click on it and save it to my hard drive. And I can do that comfortably because I know that this book--they've already done the vetting of whether or not it was under copyright. So I'm going to save that one to my hard drive, showing Charles S. Windover's company in Huntingdon. This is right about the same time Harry would have worked there. But I want to show you this gem of the thumbnail. Up here there's a little checkerboard-looking button. We're going to click it. Look at the difference. So instead of doing page after page after page scroll, we're going to be able to hop really quickly and look at images. Within seconds you're going to be able to spot the maps, the engravings, the portraits. If that's what you're looking for in a book, sometimes there is no caption for the OCR to find, so wouldn't it be much faster? And then you could turn to the Search box in the book and start searching for other keywords. Are there any other pages? No, this is it. There's only one with Windover. Here's another gem. I have--somehow this has passed down safely to us from the 1870s, Harry's original blacksmith apprenticeship document. And in the bottom right-hand corner, he has signed it, his father has signed it, and there's the signature of Martin Haynes. And Raymond just says simply he worked as a blacksmith for Martin Haynes and apprenticed with him. So I want to learn a bit more about him. Could he be in Google Books? I did "Huntingtonshire," "blacksmith," "Martin Haynes" in quotes. I also put the operator "OR" in caps. And then I did "Haynes Martin" because sometimes people get listed last name first, right? Check this out. He's on the Kelly's Directory of Bedfordshire. I click through. Here's a little summary of the town of Brampton at that time, and it lists Martin Haynes as a blacksmith. There's also Google Scholar, and if you would like to kind of zero your search into only scholarly works from universities, particularly works with source citations, wouldn't that be nice? We hope you're citing all your sources. And it's nice to work with a well-documented document, because in Google Scholar if you find something, those links, those sources, will be linked to sources. So you can find more to work with. And Google Alerts is built right in. So it will be restricting you not to the whole web, but to courts, universities, academic publishers. The good news is, again, just like Google Books, Images, Scholar can use search operators that we talked about. So follow the source citations that you find to find other relevant works, because that's who they're leaning their research on. That would be worth taking a look at. I did a search on "horseless carriage" and "David Salomons" in quotation marks, each group, and got several great items here, but we know that stuff gets published all the time. So there's your Create Alert button. Click it. If you're signed into your Google account, you can set that up so that now you'll only be notified if a new source comes up in Google Scholar that mentions what it is you're searching for. There's also Google Patents. Now, this was launched in 2016. It indexes patents and patent applications. Yeah, you got a question? How do you find [INAUDIBLE] search? Because I put it in before [INAUDIBLE].. How does the Google Alerts find-- How does it let me know? Oh, good question. How does it let you know? Because you sign into your account, and when you type your query in there, and you click Create Alert, you're going to give it an email address that you want it to email a link to you that goes to the new or updated pages or items that are on the web. So it's going to do it via email. And some people set up an account, like an email account, just for Google Alerts. I want them now. So I put them in my main email address, and it sends them to me in the morning. Thank you for having me clarify that. Yes. Do you have different address--because I've used my Gmail address. Yes. [INAUDIBLE] use that. I want my real address. So she's asking, "Do I have to use my Gmail account if I have multiple email addresses?" You can give it any email, Yahoo, whoever you want, and it will send your alerts there. Yes. So Google Patents is going to have patents from the U.S. Patent and Trade Office from 1790 and from the European Patent Office worldwide 1978, not quite as late. But remember, your ancestor doesn't have to be an inventor. He could be mentioned. He could be somehow involved in whatever this creation was. But right now there's about eight million public domain documents available, and that's being added to all the time. And, again, keyword searchable, OCRed. So I did a quick patent search. Now, interestingly, one of the things that Raymond said in his document was that Sir David was quite the inventor, but he would go and say, "Cooke, I need you to jerry-rig this for the new horseless carriage." And so he would figure out something, make it, and then Sir David would patent it under his name. Now, I just checked, just in case there were any patents here listed. I didn't expect it, because the European ones don't go back, you know, past 1978. Got lots of Harry Cookes. Turned out there was a Harry Edmund Cooke, so I grabbed my minus sign and subtracted out Edmund, did William. Now, I remembered as I was doing this that my husband's father was one of the inventors of particleboard. So I typed in "William * Cooke," with an "e," put quotation marks around it, and then there were still quite a few. So I went and did a search to prioritize that I know that he would not have done this prior to 1950. And sure enough, several patents came up. I can go in, and I can alter my search. I could get rid of the asterisk, and I could put in his middle name or just remove it altogether. That actually helped. Several here. He had some that the patent was in his name and some that mention him as being a player in whatever patent was eventually developed.

So as you can see, lots of them here, and because they're out of copyright, you can download these. I actually found the image of one of the tiles. It was like where they were compressing materials in order to create particleboard. And I was able to print that out and frame it, and that's in Bill's office now, which he really enjoys.

Let's see, and if you find one, you'll find that the inventor's name is hyperlinked. So once you have identified the right person, I can click Harry H. Cooke, and it will start to find any other patents that he's named in. YouTube--that's another one of them--2005 they got started; 2006, oh, it grew up to 100 million videos; November 2006, Google purchases YouTube. It is the most popular channel in the world. And, of course, they eventually closed down Google Video. So video, what can you find? Anything and everything. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] These days, inn signs are merely a form of almost incidental decoration. But at the beginning of the 19th century, they indicated stopping places for stagecoaches, like this famous Tunbridge Wells Flyer.

And had the paint stripped off to reveal the name of the Royal Wells. Sitting four inside and 14 on top-- Put that baby in a car seat! [VIDEO PLAYBACK] --they used to travel regularly between Suffolk and Tunbridge Wells via Lewisham, Bromley, and Sevenoaks.

The fact that some of the lovely countryside on route has now been built upon doesn't prevent Mr. Louis Evans from recapturing the shared exhilaration of a coach ride. However, when he doesn't feel up to such a comparatively hectic pursuit, you can always relax with another of his hobbies, the newfangled horseless carriage.

[END PLAYBACK] What's so fun about this video is it showed me what they looked like really moving. This is a newsreel back from the 1950s. All of the old newsreels have been pretty much, as far as I know, digitized, and they're up on YouTube. And they oftentimes focused on local people doing interesting things or not even that interesting things. News events-there's so many situations where we have found people mentioned or learned more about their lives by going to YouTube. But also, once you get a nice search result going, you'll find that on the right-hand column, it's going to suggest a lot more that it thinks will fall into your subject matter that you'll want to take a look at. So here was another one where they were showing somebody again back in 1961 who had a horseless carriage collection. It was really fun to see how they worked, how they literally opened them up, that the stairs folded down, that they had this big tin hot-water bottle. And you'd fill it with hot water and put it under the people's feet in the carriage. On the right-hand side is a video in German on YouTube about Daimler, the inventor of the Mercedes Benz. He is also sitting in the carriage with Sir David Salomons that Harry is standing next to in that photo. So once I identified him, it was fascinating to see his history. And the center video I loved. This was back in 1972, I think. And not only was it showing the work of a blacksmith in the U.K., but he builds coaches. And so for the first time--I mean, I've seen the blacksmith stuff, but to really envision Harry would have been at work. And the interesting thing about this was that the pattern that they used to build the coaches is drawn in chalk on the floor. That's the only available space they had. And every time they had iron, he would go down and fit it onto other pieces and weld. And can you imagine dressmaking that way? But that's how they created coaches.

And your ancestor, think about it, could be a big player in somebody else's play. Look at not necessarily searching for names, but search for locations. One of my listeners, she searched for this town in North Carolina, and that's her great uncle. The local movie theater owner would get--he had himself a silent movie camera, and he would go every week and film people up and down Main Street because that made people want to come that week to see if they would show up on the screen before the main feature--brilliant marketing. But she said it was incredible. And if you click the link of the name of the person who uploaded this to YouTube, you will get anything else that that person has. It turned out he had five in this series.

The last tool I want to talk about before we kind of sum up our story--and I feel like I've gathered so much; I've learned so much more about their world--is using Google Earth Pro. If it's been a while since you've used Google Earth, go back and download the pro version. It used to be $400. It's free now. So you're going to download that, and it is a very, very powerful tool. Because it contains geographic data, it also includes historical maps. It has HD quality imagery and movie makers built in, so you can literally record movies of traveling the world and researching your ancestors. This is going to be something you're going to install on your computer. This is not a website. There is a Google Earth for Chrome, but we're talking about the software. So search for ancestral location names. Look for historic maps. I've also solved many mysteries for me about what's the corresponding address. I know what it is today, but it's changed, and being able to use the old maps-- Let me show you the Rumsey Historic Maps that are built right into Google Earth. If you go up and go to the Search box and search for "Tunbridge Wells," it will fly in there. And then we're going to go and turn on one of the data sets. Down in the Layers panel, this is on your left-hand side at the bottom, you open--any time you see an arrow, if you click it, it will open for more. We're going to look at the Gallery. So I zoom out a little bit so I can see all of England and turn on the Gallery down here underneath Weather. And then you'll find, if you scroll down, Rumsey Historic Maps. Click that. These medallions that show up on the screen, if you click on them or hover your mouse, you'll see what the year is: 1790, the U.K. Here's the fully digitized map. Click it; you've got it. It's completely overlayed. They've geo-referenced it to be as accurate as possible to match up with the modern-day map. It's going to show up in your Temporary Places until you save your file. But look at this: there's an opacity slider right under the Places Panel, right above Layers. And it's like you can shift between the maps. And, in fact, I have layered many maps so that I can go from 2018 to 1910 to 1880. Anybody with German ancestors? You know those borders change. Even when the map is displayed, you can still do Street View. You can jump right through the historic map and see what it looks like today. And there's that opacity slider again, right under there. So this has come in really handy finding particularly towns that no longer exist or they've changed their names. I like to drag and drop those up into my Places Panel, and then you must File, Save. Save My Places before you close the program. It doesn't autosave.

A little hidden gem that I want to leave you as a final is you get 150 with that little Rumsey box, but there are 300 more I want to get you. They are worldwide. You can save these to your Places Panel. All you have to do is go back in, click any of the medallions that show up. And remember the box that has the image that shows you which map you're going to get. At the bottom there's a link, and it says "Download All the Free Maps." It's so easy to miss. But as soon as you click it, you've now downloaded about 300 historic maps from 1650 to about 1930 into your Places Panel. They are worldwide. I got many, many more in England, just amazing wealth of items. If you like mapping, and you want to learn more about that, in my book The Genealogist's Google Toolbox, we also talk about overlays. So if you have paper copies, you can scan those, and you can actually bring them in in overlay. You can really start to rebuild their world in Google Earth. So we started with this. We started with a known, but I wanted to tell a richer, kind of more complete story. And I dug around on Google, and piece by piece that story started to reveal itself. And I want to share it with you.

And this story is narrated by my husband. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] On August 23, 1890, my grandfather Reverend John Williams Munns, father of Marianne Suzannah Munns, was minister of the Village Chapel in Brampton. He performed the wedding ceremony for my mother, who was organist at his chapel, and my father, who was a Sunday school teacher. Shortly after the wedding, mother was visiting in the town of Huntingdon and heard of a position being open for a coachsmith and a blacksmith at Windover and Windover. They were coach builders at Huntingdon. She ran several miles home to Brampton to tell my father. He was the village blacksmith, working for Martin Hayes in Brampton, where he had completed his apprenticeship. Dad succeeded in getting the job. Windover and Windover had a very large plant and employed 81 blacksmiths and had 81 forges. They made, among other things, elaborate horse sleighs which they shipped by boat to Russia.

During Dad's apprenticeship, he spent the last three years of it hand-forging all the gates at Hinchingbrooke Castle, Huntingdon, the home of Lord Hinchingbrooke. The castle had formerly been the home of Oliver Cromwell.

After dad worked in Huntingdon for a while, they moved him to Tunbridge Wells, where they had a small coach-building business. Soon after arriving at Tunbridge Wells, I was born March 6, 1894, at 5 Mountfield Road.

It was quite close to the center of town and only a short walk to the theater, where all the big plays, light operas, etc., performed. To supplement Dad's wages, Mother used to rent a room occasionally to some of the actors. Eventually, Windover and Windover decided to close their business, and Dad's friends persuaded him to go into business for himself. Five or six of his old workmates came to work for him, and he did very well, as he was able to retain many of his previous customers. One customer in particular was Sir David Salomons. He had a very large estate on the edge of town called Broomhill. Dad and several of his men would ride their bicycles to Broomhill every day, where they worked on his carriages.

One evening quite late, Sir David phoned Dad from Paris. He told Dad he was buying a French automobile and would bring it across the English Channel the next day. Dad was to go to Dover on the train and meet him. When Dad met him, it was Dad's job to walk ahead of the auto a distance of 40 miles. He waved a red flag as a warning to the people driving horses, as the horses became quite frightened by his infernal machine. It was probably one of the first, if not the first, automobile in England. The return to Tunbridge Wells took about two and a half days, as they were not allowed to travel any faster than a person could walk.

[END PLAYBACK] [APPLAUSE] As you can see, you're just holding the tip of the iceberg of what you already have. And I hope that you enjoy telling richer and more complete stories. I want to encourage you--if you found some of these, I am coming back to the area, to Sandy. October 4 and 5--we are doing a Genealogy Gem's two-day event, and this is going to be a little different, in that you're not going to move from room to room. We're going to have you all to ourselves in one big room with a lot of seats and do amazing things with your family history research. Tomorrow, I'm going to be teaching some more classes. And I hope you'll stop by our booth at 1203, because we really want to help you tell deeper and richer stories. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm going to be teaching at 4:30. Hope to see you then.