June 11, 2012

Episode 134: You asked for it!  Here's a blast from the past: Episodes 1 & 2 of the Genealogy Gems Podcast!

Episode 01 February 25, 2007

by Lisa Louise Cooke

My goal in creating this podcast is to provide you with inspiration and innovation to help you get the most of out your research time.  There's never enough time to work on your family tree, is there? So when you have some precious moments to dig into your roots, you want to be mining gold nuggets, not dead ends. 

Genealogy Gem: Google.com allows you to restrict search results to a specific website.  

1 - Go to your favorite genealogy website
2 - Highlight the website address (URL)
3 - Hit the Control key and the letter C at the same time on your keyboard  (this copies the website address to your computer's clipboard.)
4 - Go to Google.com
5 - Click in the Google search box to place your cursor there
6 - Hit the Control key and the letter V at the same time on your keyboard  (this pastes the website address in the search box that you just copied from the other site.)
7 - Hit the HOME key on your keyboard (this takes your curser to the beginning of the URL address in the search box)
8 - Now type a keyword you want to search (a surname for instance)
9 - Hit the space bar on your keyboard
10-Then type SITE: (be sure to include the colon after the word SITE:)
11- Click the SEARCH button

You will receive search results just like a regular Google search, except these results show only pages where your keyword appears in the website you chose to search, rather than every website on the internet!

Believe me, once you use this gem, you will never go back to slogging through hundreds of pages that have nothing to do with your family.  Try it today!

I hope you'll subscribe to this podcast so you won't miss a single gem packed episode.   Email me with feedback, suggestions, and questions.

GEM:  Transcription of Family Journals & Letters

Start with what you know.    Then talk to your oldest relatives first before you lose them.   

• Ask for letters and journals 
• Invest time into combing through and transcribing them into a digital format (such as a Word document) 
• Print it out and go through it with a highlighter 
• Highlight, names, places, dates, etc. 
• Create a list of the highlighted items and do a Google search on each (both text & images where applicable) 

Transcription is worth it! 

One of my inspirations:  the autobiography of my husband's grandfather Raymond Harry Cooke born March 6, 1894 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.    This journal led to the discovery of the following photograph...

The Rose Theatre Staff  in 1914 (Material courtesy of the City of Regina Archives":

Bottom left corner: Raymond Harry Cooke.  To his upper right, Miss Belle Osborne.  They later married, and remained so for over 50 years.

Please email feedback and questions.  Be sure to let me know how you heard about the podcast.