Librarian Central

Find a Page from your Past

By Ben Bunnell, Manager, Library Partnership Team

The idea that within our lifetimes, people everywhere will be able to search all the world's books from their desktops thrills me. I believe that the creation of a comprehensive and completely searchable corpus of printed knowledge will lead to all kinds of cool and unexpected connections between people and information. Even though this project is still fairly new, we're already seeing a variety of interesting uses of the tool. A number of people are using Google Book Search to search for their own names, and sending us stories about the sometimes surprising results.

For instance, a woman from California wrote to tell us what she discovered when she tested Book Search by typing in her maiden name.

Wow! I had no idea that my uncle was mentioned in a book – The Book of Renee by Renn Martin – that he built an x-ray machine, and that the author of the book wondered where he was today and wished him well. I passed that information on to him – I am sure he has already bought the book by now.

Another Google user, Rob Johnston, was so inspired by what he found after searching for his grandmother's name that he wrote a blog post about it.

[The] search…revealed information from Not Just Any Medical School: The Science, Practice, and Teaching of Medicine at the University of Michigan 1850-1941, about her work as a chemist in the laboratory of Lewis Harry Newburgh. There I saw that she may have worked with my grandfather, Franklin Johnston, who was a patient of Dr. Newburgh, and I also learned that she worked with Newburgh for more than twenty years and her "name was usually first on Newburgh's papers and sometimes alone on others." Impressed by my grandmother's remarkable professional accomplishments (she was a woman working in academia before 1941 when this book ends) I decided to buy a copy of the book. Now I have it at home full of these tidbits of family history.

And then there's the story from a man in South Carolina, who wrote to tell us what happened after he plugged in his family's surname.

I found Plymouth Labor and Leisure: Images of America, a book by James W. Baker. Clicking the link brought me to a 1914 photo of my great uncle, Earl Robichau. Never before could I have found such an obscure and wonderful gem…My father in Florida , who happens to be homebound most of the time, spends hours combing through the pages of this book. Most of the photos in it were taken during his childhood when he spent much time in Plymouth. I sat for long periods of time over Thanksgiving listening to my father recount memories triggered by Mr. Baker's book. Google, along with the publishing company, brought some unexpected happiness to someone who really needed it.

These stories, and others like them, fascinate me because they suggest that Google Book Search is becoming a useful tool for discovering the past, both personal and collective. "Ego-surfing" the web is not new, but generally speaking, web-based information reflects the youth of the Internet, and older historical works just haven't been available to be included in a search. Of course, a genealogist's toolkit is large and varied, and I'm not suggesting that Book Search is supplanting public records, family letters, newspaper articles, or the files kept by genealogical societies. Still, I think it has the potential to become a valuable addition to the toolkit, or at the very least, a good starting point for people who haven't delved deeply into their family histories before. My own experience bears this out.

I tried searching for my own name, Bunnell, in Book Search, and discovered that one of my namesakes wrote an early description of the Yosemite Valley, and another was a manufacturer of telegraph equipment (I've since confirmed that the first Bunnell is indeed a direct ancestor, but the jury's still out on the second).

I'm convinced that I wouldn't have found these references without the ability to do a full-text search of the books. Genealogical research can be complicated by the fact that some books are so rare, the likelihood that you'll find them in even a single library is fairly low. OCLC did a study of the combined collections of the libraries whose books we're digitizing, and found that the majority of books in the combined collection are held in only one of the five analyzed libraries. As we add more rare books to the index, I expect we'll hear more stories from people like me who've discovered previously buried family references.

If you, your patrons or students are interested in researching your family history, I encourage you to give Google Book Search a try at http://books.google.com. Especially if you've got a fairly unusual name (sorry to the John Smiths out there), enter your name and see what happens. And if you discover something interesting, feel free to share your story with us – we may post it on our website.