Genealogy research is connecting, more and more, with modern technology. You probably use an online website to do your research from, instead of traveling to a courthouse archive to do it. That’s just one example. A man in India used Google Earth to find his long, lost, family.
Have you ever used Google to help with your genealogy research? Some genealogists have. Type the name of your ancestor into the Google search engine. Perhaps some helpful information will come up. If nothing good comes up, you can try different combinations of keywords. Try your ancestor’s first name and surname. Next, try that and the city that you think he was born in. Keep going!
I’ve never thought about using Google Earth to do genealogy research. However, a man in India has done exactly that. The result was that he found his long, lost, family!
Saroo Brierley is 31 years old. When he was five years old, he was sweeping trains outside of Calcutta. He fell asleep, expecting that his brother would wake him up. Instead, the boy slept for 14 hours and woke up in an unknown city. At first, he lived on the streets. Later, he was taken in by an orphanage. After that, he was adopted by a new family, and he moved from India to Tasmania in Australia.
Trying to track down his original family, all these years later, would be no easy task. He didn’t remember the name of his hometown. He did some mathematics to figure out the distance the train he was sleeping on would have traveled in the fourteen hours that he slept. This included the speed that the train would have been traveling at. This gave him a large area to start with.
After that, he used the satellite images on Google Earth to look at that area, and to match it with his memories. The key was when he found a waterfall that he remembered playing in as a child. Long story short, this led to Mr. Brierley traveling back to India and being reunited with his mother.
I think this is fascinating! The next time you hit a “brick wall” while trying to do research about a relative that you only have vague memories of, try using Google Earth. If your relative is still alive, this could, potentially, result in a reunion. Or, it might lead you to cousins and extended family that you have never met before, and may not have known about.
Image by NASA Earth Observatory on Flickr