History and Genealogy Resources

It is a little weird finding a multitude of other people with the same first and last name.  I found a record of my birth through the Minnesota Birth Index but could not find anything connected to my marriage license.  I tried refining the search using both my maiden and married name.  I did find my former addresses from Ohio and North Carolina!  I used the hot keys and a more advanced search.  Even checking female, I still came across records for males.

I then searched for my paternal grandmother.  My siblings and I know very little about that side of the family.  I found a 1940 census and opened the scanned document.  An interesting item I found when I looked at this closely is that the highest education attained for both my grandparents was 6^th grade.  I followed one of my dad’s sibling’s birth record and discovered my grandmother’s maiden name is Bundeman.  It is very easy to get lost in this database.  I also found that the paternal last name of Wiese has also at times been spelled, Weise.  It is amazing how common a particular name (first and last) is in a region.

I typed in South Dakota in the location box and then selected pictures.  The first results were of professional baseball players which was followed by U.S. School Yearbooks.  These yearbooks did not have pictures but often had quotes or short pieces of conversation.  I read that some of these, though not linked to ancestry give a glimpse into life at that time.  There were 212,157,910 results.  Wow!  I did like the left side bar that would allow me to narrow into further categories.  It could be fun to show a class the historic catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co.  I especially like the catalog page that advertised a set of Encyclopedia Britannica for 19.95.  The historical postcards would also be fun for teachers in social studies and history.  I have an old postcard for 1976 of the Cosmos (which between Rapid City and Hill City), it is hilarious.  I did refine the search for Rapid City as still had many postcards for this region.

In Heritage Quest, I tried a lot of different searches but probably didn’t have the correct search terms.  I did a search of Mahnomen, Minnesota and found articles from the Mahnomen County Historical Society Newletter.  The oldest article they had was from 1987.  Technology in some cases only reach so far back.  I then checked out some of the other blogs who had completed this lesson and was able expand my ideas for search terms.  Coming back on a different day, I did a search of Rapid City and found many items (424) however I was unable to read any of these but I could request a copy of the article.  When I searched Mahnomen this time , I had 91 results.  There was a variety of topics such as discontinue the sale of Oleo in 1930, lists of women employed in stores and government offices.  I had a teacher telling me about the Minnesota Massacre this week so I decided to look this up too.  I had grown up in Minnesota and had never learned or heard of this event.  I was rewarded with 19 results that I will be requesting copies of to share with this teacher.  History books don’t necessarily tell us all about the little nasty parts of history, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.  The more I searched, the more ideas I had for further searches.  It was easy to get sucked into this database.

In Sanborn Maps, I searched the small towns that my husband’s family is from and found Eureka but nothing for Long Lake.  Maybe Long Lake was too small to include or these are lost maps.  Having spent time in Eureka is last summer, I noticed that one of the Lutheran Churches seemed to be in the same location.  Not originally from South Dakota I found the maps interesting but do not really know enough of the history in many of the small towns.  Many of the maps are from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s when looking at the smaller towns. Even Rapid City’s maps only went to 1948 and Sioux Falls went to 1950.  I checked out other towns and found maps for 1960’s Aberdeen.   It would be nice if maps of these towns from each decade were included for comparisons.  I did like that you could print and download the maps.  I could see pairing the historical picture component  from Heritage Quest to Sanborn Maps.  Idea for a great historical mashup?