PROVO, Utah -- There may be photographs of your ancestor online. There may also be someone online right now who is searching for that photograph you have of your great-grandfather.

Daniel M. Lynch, the author of "Google Your Family Tree," shared some of his techniques for finding family history-related photographs and videos at the BYU Conference on Computerized Family History and Genealogy on Friday, March 13.

The tool  Lynch recommended is Google.com's Image Search.



To find images on Google, it is important to use good search terms. Lynch said to determine what you want: who are you trying to find where they lived and when they lived.

Single terms entered into Google's Image search may find results, but adding other words also helps.

One method that Lynch proposed is to add a tilde (~) to a search term. A tilde will look for synonyms of the word that you enter. For example, he said that a great search term to add to photo searches, along with a tilde, is "~vintage." The word vintage with the tilde will also search for "old," "historic," "retro," "Victorian" and other related terms.

Another term to use with a tilde would be "~genealogy."

Many of Lynch's ancestors are from Italy. His search for photographs of the village of Campobasso shows another method to use on Google. He could have put in searches for "campobasso church" or "campobasso cemetery," but he recommended using Google's Language Tools to find the Italian words for "church" and "cemetery." Searching for "campobasso chiesa" and "campobasso cimitero" gave new results.

But don't just search for photos. Lynch said it helps to share as well: "If you go to a family gathering and you bring all your documents versus bringing one photo, the photo will get a discussion going much quicker than that pile of documents ever could. Everyone wants to pass the photo around. Bring a copy, by the way, because if it is an old photo you don't want like a thousand people poring over it next to the potato salad."

If you are going to post family photographs online, he recommends putting good descriptive text with the photo to make it easier for someone to find them with a search engine. Even the file names need to have information that can be searchable.
"Please try to name the photos with something meaningful so that the search engines (can) see those words," Lynch said.

Lynch told about one family photograph from the first half of the last century. His grandmother had told him the people in the picture were the family from Italy -- but that was all he knew. He tried everything to identify the people without success, so he posted it online on his website. Two years later a person in the United Kingdom was able to identify someone in the photograph who was still alive. She was 95 years old. Lynch took a large copy of the photograph to Italy. The woman remembered when it was taken and was able to identify everybody in the photograph.

Searching for videos is similar to searching for images. Because Google bought YouTube.com, Lynch said that using Google Video search would give more results than YouTube alone. He said to search for things related to the area of an ancestor -- such as a church, cemetery and villages.

People and tourists post videos of their visits to many places around the world and can give glimpses into an ancestor's life. "They walk through a cemetery for 20 minutes with the camera rolling. Sounds boring to a lot of people -- except to people like us," Lynch said.

Lynch said there are also many educational videos online that teach how to do genealogy.

"You will find things online, depending on how you luck is on a given day, depending on what someone has found and put online for you," Lynch said. "There's a lot of nuts like me who love this stuff."

E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com