Fun Things to Do Online: Google Earth, Family Trees and Virtual Travel

Most tech advice is about getting things done. Paying a bill, dodging a scam, setting up a new phone. All useful, but it misses half the point. The internet is also good fun, and some of the best of it costs nothing.

This guide walks through three of the nicest ways to spend an hour online. You can fly over the street you grew up on, dig into your family history, and wander through a museum in Paris without leaving the couch. None of it needs any special skill. If you can open a web page, you can do all of this.

Grab a cup of tea. Here’s where to start.

See the world from your armchair with Google Earth

Google Earth is a map of the whole planet built from satellite photos. You can spin the globe, zoom in on a city, tilt the view to see mountains and buildings in 3D, then drop right down to the footpath and look around as if you were standing there. It’s free, and you don’t need to sign up for anything. And for the everyday side of maps, directions, traffic and Street View, our Google Maps guide covers it step by step.

The easiest way in is your web browser. Go to earth.google.com and it opens straight away. There’s also a free Google Earth app for iPad, iPhone and Android tablets if you’d rather use one of those. Both work the same way.

Try this first

Click the little search icon and type in your own address, or the street where you grew up. The map will fly you there. Now look for the small orange figure of a person in the bottom corner, called Pegman. Drag that figure onto a road and let go. The view drops down to ground level, and suddenly you’re standing on the street looking around. Drag the picture to turn, and click the arrows on the road to walk along it.

This is where people lose an afternoon. Folks look up the house they were born in, the school they went to, the church where they got married, the town their parents came from. One woman we helped found the farm gate she used to swing on as a child, still there in the photo. Have a look at your old neighbourhood in Ballarat or Newcastle, then jump to a street in London or a beach in Bali. It’s all a few clicks apart.

If it feels fiddly at first, that’s normal. Give it ten minutes and the dragging starts to feel natural. There’s nothing you can break and nothing to pay.

Trace your family tree online

Family history used to mean driving to a records office and squinting at microfilm. A lot of it is now online, much of it free, and Australia has some fine public records once you know where to look. This is a hobby that tends to grow on you. One name leads to a marriage, a marriage leads to a ship, and before long you’ve filled a notebook.

Where to start: FamilySearch

FamilySearch (familysearch.org) is the biggest free family history site in the world. It’s run by a non-profit and it costs nothing, though you do set up a free account. You type in what you know, a parent or grandparent’s name and roughly when they were born, and it searches billions of records for matches. It also lets you build a family tree as you go, so your findings are saved in one place.

Australian records, free to search

In Australia, births, deaths and marriages are handled state by state rather than all in one place, so there’s no single national website. Each state and territory registry looks after its own records, and most publish a free online index you can search for older entries. Searching the index is free. You only pay if you order an official certificate, and for family curiosity you often don’t need to.

Two national sites are the real treasures, both free. Trove (trove.nla.gov.au), run by the National Library of Australia, holds millions of pages of old Australian newspapers going back to the 1800s. Search a family surname and you might turn up a wedding notice, an obituary, or a mention of your great grandfather’s prize marrow at the local show. And the National Archives of Australia (naa.gov.au) holds immigration and passenger records, so you can sometimes find the exact ship and voyage an ancestor arrived on.

A little help along the way

The Society of Australian Genealogists and the family history society in your state have guides, local branches and people who are happy to help beginners. And here’s a tip that saves money. Many public libraries, and the State Library in your state, give members free access to the big paid sites like Ancestry, Findmypast and MyHeritage when you use them inside the library or through the library website. So before you pay for a subscription, check what your local library already offers. If you get stuck with the computer side of it, our guide to free tech help for seniors in Australia lists places that will sit down and show you.

Take a virtual trip anywhere

If the travelling days are behind you, or the airfare isn’t, the internet brings a surprising amount of the world to you. The pictures are good enough that it feels like a proper visit, and you can go at your own pace with no queues and no sore feet.

Start with Google Arts and Culture (artsandculture.google.com). It has teamed up with more than 2,000 museums and galleries around the world so you can walk through them room by room, the same way you walked through your own street on Google Earth. Stand in front of the paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, see the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum in London, or stroll the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. You can zoom right into a painting and see brush strokes you’d never spot from behind a rope in real life.

Closer to home, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra puts its collection online at searchthecollection.nga.gov.au, and the National Museum of Australia has a Collection Explorer full of Australian history and stories. So you can browse Australian art, photographs and history from your kitchen table. And don’t forget Google Earth again here. Use that same Pegman trick to walk down a canal in Venice, along the Great Wall of China, or through the market town your family came from. Line it up with what you find in your family tree and you can actually see where your people lived.

A gentle word on staying safe

Everything here is genuinely free, which is worth remembering. Google Earth, FamilySearch, Trove, the National Archives and Google Arts and Culture do not ask for your credit card. If a site suddenly demands payment to show you “the full record”, stop and check whether the same thing is available free somewhere else first, because it often is. Family history in particular attracts paid sites, and some are worth it, but you rarely need to pay on day one.

The only accounts you’ll set up here are free ones with FamilySearch or Google. Use a sensible password and you’re fine. If you ever get an email out of the blue saying there’s a problem with one of these accounts, treat it with the same caution as any other message. Our guide to spotting scam messages covers the warning signs.

How to get started today

You don’t need to set aside a whole day. Pick one of these and have a go. If you’ve never used tablets or computers much before, our guide on a gentle start with first tech is a good companion.

Do one this week. Show a grandchild what you found, or ring your sister and compare notes on the family tree. Half the fun is sharing it.