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Saturday, July 08, 2006

Google Books and a Genealogy Success Story

By Ginger Frere

You may have heard about Google’s new Book Search tool. Google’s goal is to build a searchable index that will “enable all people to discover all books”. This is a huge project with lots of challenges, but the Beta version of this tool is already a great source of information for genealogists.

Basically, it works like this: Enter your search terms and click on “Search Books”. You’ll see a results page (similar to a web search results page) where you can select the results you’d like to view. The amount of information you see when you click on a selection depends on the book’s copyright status. You may see some basic information like a library catalog entry. You may also see a few “snippets” of text from the book. If Google has permission from the author or publisher you’ll see a few pages from the book. If the book is out of copyright (published before 1923) you’ll be able to see the entire book. There are links to online bookstores and, in some cases, you’ll see a “Find in a Library” link.

Google hasn't disclosed how many books they’ve indexed so far. The results of a search tell you how many pages your search terms appear on – not how many books were found. But to give you a rough idea, a search for “smith family” found results on 6,450 pages. A search for the word “smith” came up with 6.5 million pages. The word “family” was found on over 15 million pages.

While not everyone has family members who are mentioned in published works and not every published book is available online, it’s definitely worth giving Google Books a try.

I plugged in the name of an ancestor “Thomas Houren” who was an Irish immigrant shoemaker and clicked on the search button. Only one result was returned, but it was information I would have never found without the aid of Google Books.

Thomas’s name appeared in a book published in 1892 titled: “The Labor Movement: The Problem of To-day” by Terence Vincent Powderly, Edmund J. (Edmund Janes) James. It seems my great-great grandfather was one of the founders of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, an early labor union for shoemakers.

Finding this information was great, but I wanted to see this in print! A quick check of The Newberry Library online catalog showed that a copy was available. After perusing “The Labor Movement”, I wanted to learn still more about the knights of St. Crispin. I checked Google Books again and found several books on the subject, some of which were in the Newberry collection. By looking at the subject headings in the library catalog entries for these books, I found additional books in the Newberry collection that were pertinent to my research.

Google books led me to a crucial piece of information which then allowed me to do further research, using both online and print sources. I now have a wealth of material to help me learn about this period of time in my great-great grandfather’s life. You can bet I’ll be doing more Google Books searches as Google continues to expand the number of books in their collection! Genealogists now have one more tool to help us find our elusive ancestors.
For more information, visit http://books.google.com/googlebooks/about.html