Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Getting Out of the Rut

Are you stuck in a rut doing your research?  Do you consistently check databases such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch and others?  They are all great, but there's even more.  Start searching for databases that are on library, historical society and genealogical society web pages.  There are some amazing things you will want to explore!  Here's a sampling: 

downloadable guides in PDF format
Ohio Death Certificates 1908-1953
Cleveland Necrology File (pre 1975) 
Cleveland News Index (1975 to current) 
Inventory of City, Criss Cross and Telephone Directories 

Illinois During the Civil War 1861-1865 
The Mexican-American War 
Illinois Civil War Newspapers 
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society .... and more 

Index of Local Birth, Death and Marriage Announcements from newspapers 
Local Cemetery Records 
Wyoming Genealogy Resources 

Cemeteries 
Churches 
Census, Directories, Tax Payers and Voters 
History
Military 
Biographies 

Obituary Notebook Index 1896 to present (over 32,000 entries) 
Family Surname Index (over 4,400 entries)

Cemetery Index and List 
Obituary Index 1866-2000 

There's a lot more out there, so start Googling for libraries and societies that have web pages and check them out.  

2 comments:

Greta Koehl said...

One of the "smart" things I did when starting genealogy (as opposed to many stupid things I did) was not to subscribe to Ancestry for the entire first year. I had to find and learn how to use many other online resources - GenWeb/RootsWeb, state archives, county and genealogy society resources, etc.

Ruby Coleman said...

That's a great idea Greta. It is so easy to just turn to subscription databases because we "think" they contain everything.

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