Lesson 9: Genealogy

1.  First I went under Immigration to find the Ship Pictures and Descriptions.  Typing in Titanic gave me 6 results which I quickly went through and found the Olympic which was built by Harland and Wolff was a sister ship.  I was surprised to find that many of those fantastic expensive ships of that era were not actually at sea for long because they were shipwrecked!  How tragic and...wasteful?

2. I started under the search tab in Ancestry where the newspaper/publications collections are found.  I typed in dirigible as the keyword and that was too broad with too many results (but interesting!)  So then I typed in Hindenburg (and Hindenberg because I didn't check the spelling, but it didn't matter because it came out with very similar results!) That didn't narrow it down enough either.  Finally, duh, the lightbulb came on (it's been a long day) and I typed in Hindenburg disaster as the keyword phrase and added 1937 as the date and found some articles in Stars and Stripes.  (It didn't help that there was a President von Hindenberg was in office in 1937 as well and he kept messing up my results....).  The articles I did find on the required subject were interesting ones that were remembering the event 20 years later or about using dirigibles for airlifting supplies after WWII.  Another was marking the death of a famous commander/pilot of the dirigibles,  Eckener, and mentioned the Hindenburg disaster within the article.  Although I found the information interesting, I would have preferred something that was from the actual date of the disaster, which I was not able to locate.  If I had to do this with a patron, I don't think I would use this resource, but would search a different database, such as ProQuest where I found a very detailed article about the airship disaster.

3.  I looked under PERSI under "places" for Gregory County and found a few articles in South Dakota History magazine for which we have some back issues.  If we didn't have that issue of the magazine, we could use the request form for a copy of the article.  However, they were mostly about Burke the county seat and nothing was available for anything else in the county.  I probably would go to our historical cabinet and dig out the history books and articles that we have on the county and start there instead.