Lesson 9

AncestryLibrary

1. When I searched for myself, I was interested to find there are lots of people with my name that were born about the same time as I was.  I seem to be the only one from South Dakota though :)

There were 26,801 matches to my name, the first one had my name and correct addresses that I have lived at, but oddly enough had the wrong date for my birthday - close, but not right.  So, I guess one still needs to be careful and use this as a tool to help you find original sources.

I liked that you could click on categories to narrow the search results.

2. I searched for my mother's father and found him in the 1910, 1930, & 1940 census results.  It was fun to see the original, scanned document.  The census was quite different from what it is today!  It was also neat to see my mom's name in the 1940 census as a child.  I also found, after just a little looking, the marriage record for my grandparents.

3. When I searched "South Dakota" in the location box there were over 2 million results.  You would really need to use the categories to limit your search, or you would be overwhelmed trying to look through all those results.  When I looked for Pictures, again there were way too many results, so I searched for Miller, South Dakota and found 3 historical postcards from my community.  Very interesting to see what those historical buildings in town used to look like.

4. HeritageQuest.  Again, I had trouble accessing this at school because it was blocked by our firewall, so I tried from home and was happy that I could get to it at home.

I clicked on "Persi" then filled in South Dakota, Hand County to search.  There were 11 results including newspaper articles, cemetery records, census records, and other historical records.

5. Sanborn Maps.  I searched for Miller, South Dakota and chose the January 1904 map.  I was interested to see the original businesses on main street and a little surprised at how little they were.  I did find a building that is still in it's original place - the Presbyterian Church - it was actually one of the historical post cards I found earlier also.