Shauna Hicks delivered a great start to this year’s Family History Feast with her talk Google genealogy: are you making the most of Google?

Most of us use Google but do we make the most of it? After listening to the Shauna’s presentation, I can honestly say I don’t! But I hope to from now on.

Google is much more than a search engine. A Google account, will allow you access to a whole range of free online resources, such as alerts, blogs, books, Google +, images, videos and more.

A few interesting suggestions
– use Google’s foreign language translation tools to assist with the translation of family history documents, translate content on websites and help to correspond with non-English speaking cousins
– set up Google Alerts for specific Google searches and learn when new results appear
– use Google Maps to search for the location your ancestor lived
– use Google Images to search for pictures of the place your ancestor lived, or the church that they were married at.

Shauna also suggested search strategies to maximize your search, including Boolean searching (using AND, OR, NOT) and the use of the ~ (tilde symbol), which allows you to search for a term and its synonyms (eg. a search of “~genealogy” will also bring up results that use the term “family history”.

As Shauna says, you can’t break Google, so give it a go!