Rootstech Google Books Class

Google Books is a gold mine for genealogy. They have over 25 million books digitized and searchable. All of these books are out of copyright so if you are looking for books about your ancestors or the place they lived, this is a great place to start. (Remember there could be histories found about a location, that can lead you to records. You don't know what you will find until you look.)

In order to search on Google Books here is something you will want to know about the makeup of the search engine. You can use the Boolean Search features which include:

• Quotation Marks - exact words or phrases
• OR - Looking for specific things in two places - Springville Utah OR Illinois
• Minus Sign - Subtract words - if you are looking for James Harrison -president
• Asterisk - letters or words can appear between two words - city * directory would bring things back like city telephone directory
• NumRange (..) - Narrow your search to a specific time span. 1804..1839

You can add multiple Boolean characters to a search ... "Indiana" city * directories 1830..1840. Mix and match. With Google Searches, you have to figure out what is going to pick up your information. Typically I start broad and then start to narrow my search.

Thank you Shirley Smith for bringing this information back from Rootstech. It is a good reminder of how we should be searching.