You never know when you google
 

I was idly messing about on my computer and put my mother's full married name Ruth Smoothy Gray into the search engine, figuring that Ruth Gray would produce too many hits.

There was one - from the London Gazette, listing my mother as the representative of a deceased lady. I recognised the name immediately and vaguely remembered. She lived across the road from us and I found her a bit scary, though she was just a lonely soul. Mum used to pop in to keep an eye on her and one day found her dead. I was horrified, but Mum said she always knew it would happen one day. I don't remember what happened about sorting out her estate but I do know my Mum got a dragonfly brooch for me which I sadly lost a long time ago.

I've found other lucky dip surprises by just googling - it tends to work best with unusual names of course.

Yes! When all else fails, google. I was stuck on one of my Scottish ggfathers, common name. Disappeared after the death of his first wife. I googled various versions of his name, etc but it wasn't until I googled the Ancestry mistranscription of his birth place that a 15 year old post popped up on Ancestry regarding my man. The contact had him from his second marriage to death, I had him from birth to the death of his first wife. We probably would never have connected the two halves any other way.

Another one was a disappearing ag lab with a slightly unusual first name. Not a sign of him anywhere where I THOUGHT he should be. A last ditch google brought up the astonishing information that he had inherited a vast estate in the Turks and Caicos Islands and he is extremely well documented in their museum.

OC

I've been excited by a 15 year-old post before, but then saw it was written by me!

Haha Merry, me too!

OC

Ditto for me too. Glad to know I'm not the only one who has got excited by a google hit, just to find it was me.
I have had some good finds on Google as well.

Thanks for this thread, Nell! It prompted me to tie up a few loose ends and of course, when I googled, a lot of new stuff has come on line for this family since I last looked.

OC

I have been googling lots of names, and going back over my Ancestry trees - there is a lot more information available in Hints for some of the people I put into my trees years ago.

Some now have birth dates as well as baptism dates - well they were always there when you looked at an image, but now they are picked up by the indexing.

And just so many more records available too. I am trying to be methodical and go back over each family and see what's new.

Ha, lucky we are in holidays and almost in a lockdown (well, the govt is just recommending we stay home as much as possible).

Google is how I made one of my most exciting discoveries. A more experienced person

would have put two & together earlier, but it wasn't until a distant cousin posed the

question 'I wonder how ..... knew .....? that I thought to Google the question.

Of course he could have done the same, but probably hadn't occured to him either.

Well Vita, how did ..... know .....?