As has happened many times throughout this Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge already, I changed my mind of what to write about for this letter. I was going to write about the Star of New Zealand ship, but have decided to save that one for another day. So now … S is for SEARCHING Putting it simply genealogists are searchers. We are detectives, we hunt down all the clues and piece them together one by one, which ultimately makes our family history, and to help us do this we use the internet, naturally. But with the many, many millions of genealogy websites, big and small, together with all the message boards, forums, blogs out there just how do you find what you’re looking for? The answer is to learn the art of searching … that’s how. Because HOW you search can radically change the results you get, and help narrow your focus. So lets start with the obvious one … GOOGLE ——————————————————– Here’s an example you can try with me, lets say we’re looking for some cemetery records: 1. Type the word cemetery records australia in Google’s search box, and it comes up with 21,200,000 results – now I don’t know on ANYONE that actually wants to go through that many webpages, so obviously you’ll need to narrow down your search some more. (Note the number of search results can vary depending on which version of Google you use, and I’m using Google.com.au) 2. The second step is to narrow it down further. As I’m looking primarily in South Australia, I’ll change the word Australia to “South Australia”, and see what comes up: cemetery records “south australia” gives 310,000 results. 3. Quite often you’d then look through at least the...