The program

Google recently celebrated its 20th birthday and it’s safe to say that it has changed the way everyone finds things out. While allowing you to search literally trillions of documents, as with any other search method, Google presents its own set of challenges to genealogical researchers. In the talk, we will review:

• How the internet is structured
• What Google searches and what it doesn’t
• Exact vs inexact searches
• Logical grouping of search terms — excluding search terms;
• Searching specific sites
• Wild cards
• Date ranges

Plus, we give you a tour of the new Main Line Genealogy Club website.

Our speakers

Cheryl Bittner, BA-Econ, MBA-Finance, is a retired Information Technology professional.  Cheryl started her career as a systems programmer with IBM and retired as a partner with Computer Sciences Corporation.  She spent 36 years in various technology and management roles with the majority of her work in the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries.  Cheryl has been active in Main Line Genealogy Club since retiring in 2005 and has served on the planning committee since its inception.  Cheryl has researched all 16 of her family lines back to her 2nd great grandparents.  Thanks to the genealogy interests of Cheryl’s great grandmother, one family line is researched back to the 1500s in Germany.  The descendants of  that great grandmother have held an annual family reunion for 103 years at the location of the original family farm in upstate Pennsylvania.

Michael Kearney, PhD, joined MLGC’s planning committee after retiring from a 44 year career managing large-scale information system projects at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been an active genealogical researcher for more than 25 years and has had work published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. His latest work, The Annotated World War I Diaries of Captain George F. Kearney, is now available on Amazon Books.