History and Genealogy Resources

Ancestry Library
1. Searching for myself with my married name turned nada so I tried my maiden name in the Birth, Marriage, and Death Index.  I input my year of birth, country, and state.  Got a big fat nothing of results for me but I did find the obituary listing for my paternal grandmother.
2. I have found stuff for both sets of my grandparents before using Ancestry Library.  My paternal grandfather is in the 1930 census and I found lots of stuff for his parents in the two previous censuses.  He was also listed in the SSDI and the Obituary listings.  For the fun of it, I also searched for my maternal great-great-grandmother because I know her family names pretty well (and I've searched for them before).  I found the marriage record for her, Olive M. Stiffler and my great-great-grandfather Merrill H. Totten.  They were married January 15, 1910.
3. That's a lot of year books!  It's intriguing to know that someone has digitized these and put them in a searchable database.  The LOC image collection was also interesting.  The pictures of the Corn Palace with the swastika always creeps me out though.  (I know when it was on the Corn Palace it wasn't associated with the Nazis yet, but they ruined it.) The pictures I liked the best were those of the interior of the S.S. Dakota.

Heritage Quest
4. I tried searching for anything about the town I am originally from - Anderson, Indiana - and once again, came up with nothing useful.  Those closest thing was a family history of people from Muncie, Indiana, which is where I was actually born, but I don't know the family the book is about.  Knowing I would get a gajillion hits for New Orleans, I did it anyway because I wanted, well anything....  I actually found a book called The Epidemic Summer listing the names of people who died in May - November 1853 from yellow fever.  And for those of you who don't include the months of May, September, October, or November in their definition of summer - try spending those months in New Orleans, they count as summer believe me!  :)  There was a whole lot more but this was pretty neat.  Okay, so it is morbid but it was different.

Sanborn Maps
5. I tried searching for the location of the house that my husband and I will soon be buying, or at the very least I wanted to find the street it is located on.  So I went to Pierre and chose the most recent map, which was May 1941.  Batting 0 for 3 on my first searches...Apparently Pierce Street wasn't around until sometime after 1941.  I know the house was build in 1967 but I thought maybe it would have been there anyway.  Oh well.  I did find the house I used to live on S. Taylor though.  I guess that's something.