Do You Have an Inventor Ancestor? Find out!

Using Google Patent for Genealogical Research

Written by Heather Wylie

I remember being incredibly curious, as a little girl, wanting to know what my grandmother’s father did for a living. My mother told me “he made things.”

I remember being so dissatisfied with that answer. What kind of things, I wondered. I asked my grandmother the same question, and she told me that he was an inventor and that he made all kinds of different things, but one of them was a cotton bale buckle.

I was probably seven at the time of that conversation and had absolutely no idea what a cotton bale buckle was, or why people needed them. I was much more curious about the kind of person who invented things than I was the invention. My great-grandfather seemed like such a mysterious figure to me. I would come to find out, as an adult, that his mechanically inclined mind and his patent production happened at a time of an intellectual boom following the American Civil War.

The late 1800s and early 1900s was a time in American History when innovation and invention exploded. In 1840, the patent office began keeping track of how many specific patents were filed each year and that year there were 735. (per www.uspto.gov) The number has only increased since then.

In 1911, for instance, the same year that my great-grandfather filed one of his patents there were 67,369 other patents filed that year. I am very lucky. My great-grandfather wrote letters to my great-grandmother about traveling to Washington D.C. specifically to see the patent office. He wrote about his venture into industry. Yet, despite all of the resources I do have on my great-grandfather’s work there was something I was missing: his patents.

Google Patent is a great way for you to hunt down some of those pesky patents that you know are out there but you can’t locate. This extensive database is a search engine that has records of 87 million patents from the United States, Europe, Asia, and many other countries. There’s a great chance that one of your ancestors was an inventor (there were over 1 million patent applications submitted to the United States government from 1865-1900). You never know what you might find!

Google Patent functions like many of the other Google search engines. Go to Google and in the search bar type “Google Patents.” It should be the first search option that pulls up for you. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to a new search screen. Enter your ancestor’s name there. For example, we’ll use my great-grandfathers. When I enter “Ezra Frantz” into the search his patents immediately pull up: bale-tie buckle, fence stay, and the buckle-making machine. Google Patent gives me information from when he first filed his patent application, to when it was granted, to when it expired. It also provides a text description of the patent explaining the construction and purpose.

If you have an ancestor who was an inventor, and you very well could, Google Patent may be an excellent and overlooked resource for you.