Stewart and Douglas Family History

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One thing that the internet has given us is the opportunity to just enter a name in a search engine and watch all the results appear. For us genealogists this has been a godsend of a kind. Just ten years ago we were still writing reems of letters to societies and govt dept’s and sitting in drafty church halls copying down often illegible writing from ancient church records. Today it is all so simple via the internet..

We also know that having a name such as ‘Stewart’ means having access to untold amounts of information on the web about the origins of the name. But there are ‘Stewarts’ and there are ‘Stewarts’. Not all people with this name can claim royal ascent from Scotland, many contemporary ‘Stewarts’ are such becuase their ancestors altered their original name to this. There were reasons to do such things centuries ago. For example; those French Hugenots who were persecuted and left France altered their names to avoid people knowing their origins. There are some english names today who actually started out as French.

One thing that really takes the burden off the family historian is when they can establish a ‘real’ link with, say, a Royal Stewart. Why?. Because you no longer have to spend long hours in research…your information will already be recorded in the history books. Ok, this may not be as fun as the old detective work but there is a certain satisfaction in finding one of your ancestors written up in Debretts for example. Even if it was 300 years ago.

And I have always thought, even in this age of the worldwide web, it is still more fun to sit in a library with a big fat book for reference than have the ease and simplicity of the home computor. The mystery is still there.

Popularity: 55% [?]

Naturally, most peoples’ first thought as to where to look for family history information these days is online and, in most cases, that means a google search.

It’s not a bad first choice but if your name is fairly common (like Stewart), then you’ll find that whilst there are untold thousands of results that come back from your google search, you just can’t work out which are relevant to you and which aren’t. At the other extreme, an uncommon name might turn up no results at all.

In practice, google isn’t really all that useful for this. For one thing, say I search for “stewart family history” then this site is currently the nineth entry down. Although one day this site will be a valuable resource for Stewart family history, it’s a long way from that at the moment. Even worse is the very first entry “The history of the Stewart family” which is simply the history of one particular family. So, that particular search wasn’t a whole lot of use.

You can get more specific, for instance if I search for my earliest confirmed ancestor “andrew stewart 1805″. However, that returns 747,000 entries and none of those on the first few pages are in any way relevant to me.

Or, in short, you’re unlikely to find that google searches will be of much use in your family history researches, unless you are very lucky.

Popularity: 61% [?]