Last names are like the old riddle about the choice between a doubled penny or a million dollars.
Last names double with every marriage. Every person has at least two parents, four grandparents, eight greats, etc. Within 16 generations you have over 65,000 unique ancestors, and unique last names. This increases the chance that part of your family history has been published. Sometimes theses publications are several volumes, sometimes maybe a handwritten diary locked in a library vault, or a couple of typewritten pages stapled together and given to family members at a reunion. Whatever the source, this key may unlock a mystery you have been trying to solve.
Once you have exhausted the local sources then you can use the power of the Internet to reach out to sources around the world which share your surname.
One good choice is the Family History Library (FHL) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This can be found on the Internet at www.familysearch.org. Once there, click on “Library Catalog,” you can search by names, titles, place name, key words, etc.
If the book has not yet been digitized (turned into data a computer can translate), they may have it available on microfilm which you can order to rent and read at a local Family History Center such as the one in Caribou or Bangor. Even if the book is not primarily about your ancestors, if they are indexed you will find them mentioned. I had been searching for over eight years for a connection, which I ultimately found on one page of a church history. That one page linked me from 1890 to 1590!
To see what may have been done for your family, try World Cat at www.worldcat.org or the Library of Congress at http://catalog.loc.gov. The Library of Congress is required by law to have a copy of every book published in the United States. You can use the information from the catalogs to see if you can read a copy online, or buy one.
The two main sources I search to read a book online are: www.books.google.com or www.archive.org. Both have many great old books which are no longer under copyright. I found the centennial book from an ancestor’s hometown with descriptions and pictures of the streets he would have walked on as a child. I used them to enliven his story.
During the class I gave last year, a student used these digital sources to find a book on her family, and then found a digital copy so she could see that it actually referenced part of her direct line. She was able to immediately order a copy online, and within a week of her online surname search, she had a copy of her own, in hand. She found a direct link from her grandmother to a crusader with Richard the Lionheart!
Our ancestors shrunk the world as they explored it in tiny wooden ships, we can now shrink it safely via the Internet. It’s time to get on the computer and play!
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
