Wouldn’t it be nice if Google could always be searching for your ancestors and just send you an email when it finds something. Wouldn’t it be great, to have Google searching day and night? What if I tell you that Google is already capable of assisting you in this way and has been helping family historians, hobbyists, and genealogists for the past couple of years to find their ancestors.
The tool that Google has and can help you is called Google Alerts. You basically go to Google Alerts and enter your ancestors name as an alert. How it works is that whenever Google indexes new information it will scan it for your alert and let you know. For example if I enter my ancestors name “Juan Bautista Chapa” I will get notified when ever something new is added to Google and the name is mentioned. This way I can always get notified when an article, book, or even family tree is indexed into Google’s search.
What is great is that once you set it up it will be searching night and day and all you do is read the emails that you get when ever something is found.
Another thing do is to not limit your alerts to just ancestor names, you can also enter names of towns, locations or any topic that you may be doing research on. Don’t forget to use quotes to only get exact matches. Also try and use different variants for example “Garza” also use “de la Garza”.
This is how the Google Alert Page Looks Like:
You can create Your own alerts here:
