Lesson 9: History and Genealogy Resources

Ancestry Library:  Well, I looked up my name and found out that there were a lot of people with both my first and last name that were born around the same time.  Of course I neglected to look up my maiden name connected with my birth (duh) but I did find several listings for myself anyway.  For some reason I seem to have two different birthdays listed in official records (one in September and one in November) which means I should get double presents, right?  Or trouble with Social Security should I ever try to retire.  Ha!  

 

I looked up my maternal grandparents and had fun looking at the actual 1930 Census Records.  I discovered that grandpa Ernest's father was born in Germany but his mother was born in New York and his occupation was listed as house carpenter. Actually he was a building contractor who owned most of the land in town because he built so many houses.  But I didn't know about the birthplace of his parents.  Very neat.

There were thousands of hits on South Dakota under maps and photos. I had never tried that before.  You can actually get into some high school yearbooks that way.  That would be great for genealogy searches as well.  That one will surely get passed on to the patrons who are in here searching for those kinds of resources.  I like it!  One of our patrons came in as I was working on this today and we looked her up under South Dakota maps and photos and found her college yearbook picture from her freshman year at Vermillion.

Heritage Quest:  I spent quite a lot of time trying to find things here.  I could find some of my mother's family but none of my father's in the census reports.  I did look up Niagara County, NY and found a downloadable book on the history of the county, so I downloaded a small portion and read through that.  It was very interesting.  I also typed in Gregory, Gregory County and South Dakota.  Gregory and Gregory County did not yield anything, but South Dakota as a keyword did produce quite a few county histories in the publications tab.

Some thing were full text while others were not.  But I did notice that when I typed in more than one keyword, I got a list of extraneous stuff that really did not fit the descriptors at all, except for maybe the first one on the list produced.

I went into the PERSI and looked up the keyword South Dakota under publications and came up with four main publications and noted that specific article titles were listed, but a written request was needed to obtain a full text copy of the article.  This could be a waste of time if doing genealogical research and finding that nothing in the article was even relevant.

Sanborn Maps:  I couldn't find Gregory or Canistota, SD (places that I have lived) in the Sanborn Maps, but I did find Britton, SD where I had also lived in the late 1980s.  It was interesting to look at the town from the perspective of different years of maps.  I found the church where my husband had pastored when we lived there.  It was on the 1904 map listed as the "German Lutheran Church" and on the 1908 map listed as the "Norwegian Lutheran Church".  Hmmm.  I looked at the index which was found on the latest map listed (May 1921).  It was a challenge to navigate this map, but I did it!  (I'm directionally challenged.)