Lesson 9 -- History and Genealogy Resources - Ancestry Library, Heritage Quest, and Sanborn Maps

Advanced Challenge
1. My search began with choosing "pictures" from the Quick Links at the bottom of the page. From there, I chose, "Passenger Ships and Images" from the Featured Data Collections in the right hand column. Then, I entered, "Titanic" in the "keyword" box & did a search. This resulted in 6 different ships, of which 5 were all part of the same shipping line, "White Star". I opened the link to the Titanic and learned the sister ship of the Titanic was the "Olympic".

With this knowledge, I used the back button and located the Olympic from the 6 ships that came from my previous action. I learned the Olympic was launched October 20, 1910. She cost  $7,500,000 to build, could carry 2,584 passengers (1st, 2nd, & 3rd class) and a crew of 860. Her maiden voyage was from Southampton to New York, June 14, 1911. She was rammed and holed by the British cruiser Hawke on September 20, 1911, but not seriously damaged. When the Titanic was sunk, the Olympic had some altering done to her construction. The changes included an increase to her tonnage. She served as a troopship in WWI.  She was completely refurbished in 1921, so she'd be able to burn oil fuel, and more. On May 16, 1934, she sunk the well-known lightship, Nantucket, off of the New England coast after ramming it during a dense fog. Seven members of the Nantucket's crew were killed. The Olympic was retired from service in March of 1935, sold to British shipbreakers and the scrapped remainder was dismantled in 1937.  This search also provides a photograph of the great ship.

2. From the New Collections, I chose Newspapers & Publications. Then, I chose the following filters: 1930's, North America/USA/New Jersey. At this point, I entered the word, "Hindenburg" into the keyword box and clicked on search. The results were 441 records from the following categories:

Stars and Stripes Newspaper, Europe, Mediterranean, and North Africa Editions, 1942-1964                      245

42Associated Press, Subject Card Index to AP Stories, 1937–1985

41United States Obituary Collection

34Stars and Stripes Newspaper, WWI Edition, 1918-1919

31Stars and Stripes Newspaper, Pacific Editions, 1945-1963

28Associated Press, Name Card Index to AP Stories, 1905-1990

8Canada Obituary Collection

8LeRoy Gazette (LeRoy, New York)

2Railway Gazette Worldwide Historical Data, 1860-1930

1OSIA News (Order Sons of Italy in America), 1953-1995

1Historic Catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1896-1993

3. When I initially opened up Heritage Quest, I noticed there are some "Tip of the Day" and "Census Maps" provided on the homepage. I clicked on the middle Tip of the Day and another window opened up with several tips on how to have a successful search. The Tip pages displayed Ancestry.com. Very nice feature & I found it quite helpful. Some days, I really need all the help I can get, if I want to get done within the 4 hour window I'm allowed to work each day!  The tips offered vary from basic, intermediate, and advanced.

So, with this tool to utilize, I began my search in earnest. The homepage mentioned, under Search Books - "find info on people & places described in over 28,000 family & local histories", so that's where I went. I began with entering, "Clark County, South Dakota, USA" into the "City,County, State, Country..." window and chose Exact to this place as a search criteria. This gave me zero good matches & suggested I remove the "exact" limiter. I returned to the previous search page & cleared my initial search "exact" limiter. This brought the result of over 5 million results! To the left of the results, is a column under the heading, "Family Histories & Genealogy Books", with a plethora of the results broken down into more specific categories per result. So, I began perusing this column, to eliminate those categories which may not be relevant to my search. From here, I chose the category, "History of Dakota Territory",

In choosing this book, I was then able to search through the table of contents, to investigate the various volumes & chapters within the material for appropriate content. There are a total of 5 volumes, each with a table of contents page & an index provided. I searched each volume for relevant content by examining the title pages & indexes of the volumes of this "History of Dakota Territory" book. I like that this resource allows the reader to "open in a new window/tab" which really helps the search go faster, instead of having to go back and forth a lot. Only volume I from this collection did not offer a in-depth breakdown of the various chapters in each volume, but it does have a table of contents, which helps provide more information about the topics covered in each chapter. I had to peruse the table of contents for Volume I, but began with the Index of the remaining volumes, to be able to better search for Clark County specifically. Knowing this kind of search would take far more time than I can afford to invest, due to time restrictions, I thought perhaps I should reread the Lesson instructions, thinking I may have missed something when initially reading. It occurred to me the Lesson does not require me to do any exploration of the Sanborn Maps, even though that is one of the resources listed within the Lesson Heading. Given that, I thought I'd take a peek at Sanborn Maps, thinking maybe that's where the lesson intended to have me search for the county history search. I discovered the various differences in the size of Clark/Clark County over the years, but not much else there. Lots of nice maps, but little information found during this portion of my quest.

I returned to the Tip pages, to see if there was another tip which might be helpful, even though I'm using Heritage Quest & not Ancestry.com for this portion of the lesson. At this point, I figured what the heck?!  I noticed a video available via Tip 3: Basic. It instructs the reader how to find collections on Ancestry, so I decided to venture back to Ancestry to find my answers.

Here, I chose "Stories, Memories & Histories", then narrowed this search further by category, in choosing "Social & Place Histories", followed with entering Clark County, South Dakota into the keyword box.  Once there, I edited my search to limit to County & surrounding counties. No winners there!

Somehow, I accidentally wound up on the Search page of Ancestry.com (between Home & Message Boards in the top menu on the homepage). Here, I found South Dakota & links to all of the SD content, such as Census results, Birth/death/marriage Certificates, Military (crickets chirping) collections unique to SD, etc.  I scrolled down to: South Dakota Reference, Dictionaries & Almanacs/ View other Reference, Dictionaries & Almanacs collections related to South Dakota. (21).

I clicked on the related collections link and discovered

U.S. County History Catalog

3,136

That's a lot of records to go through to find the answer. Now, had I been instructed to find the information on a different, perhaps larger, county, there would probably be several direct hits as far as the results. I've learned, since beginning my career at the Clark library, that our town isn't that old & the funeral director owns a great deal of the local historical information. Recently, I suggested to a member on the local Historical Society that they submit the records they own to the State Archives, so others might benefit from the stash of history which is hidden in Clark.

The databases of Ancestry/Heritage Quest have stymied me, as far as finding the data requested. Under "All US County History Catalog Results" (with 3,136 results to look through!) I tried to narrow it down, by attempting to eradicate irrelevant criteria, but using the "exact" function always seems to produce zero results. Hence, I set the results to show as many as possible per page (50) & began viewing each entry, going by the state/county information that shows up within the results. I wish I knew a faster, more precise way to obtain the goal, but there you have it. I could not find any shortcuts that gave the desired results. So, unless I cheat and see how others taking the advanced challenge found their answers, I went with this trip until time to go home. I'll have to continue my quest tomorrow, since it's much past closing time. For now, I'll publish this much, to add any further results found in an extra blog entry.