Daily Genealogist

Brewster Public Library, New York

rewster is a village in the town of Southeast, which is located in the southeastern part of Putnam County, New York. The Brewster Public Library has made a newspaper database available on its website. Click on the Databases tab and select Brewster Standard from the drop down list to access it.

The Brewster Standard was a weekly newspaper that covered the news of Brewster, Southeast, Tilly Foster, Sodom, Patterson, Carmel, Mahopac, Somers, North Salem, and Croton Falls, New York, and Danbury, Connecticut. The database covers the period from 1870 through 1982.Click on the “on line edition” link to open the search page. Enter keywords in the search box, and, to search for a phrase, place quotes around the words. Instructions are given for advanced searches. I offer an additional search tip: to search a particular year, be sure to include the year in your keywords. Click on the title link in the search results to display the corresponding newspaper page as a PDF. You can search within the document for key words or phrases by clicking the icon at the top left of the viewable page — the icon may be a magnifying glass or binoculars, depending on your version of Adobe Reader.

Sadie Pope Dowdell Library, New Jersey

The Sadie Pope Dowdell Library is located in South Amboy, which is on Raritan Bay in Middlesex County, New Jersey. The library has made a digital version of the South Amboy Citizen newspaper, from 1910 to 2000, available on its website. The database is split into two parts. The first covers 1910 through 1943. To begin a search in this time period, select a year from the drop down list. Then select the month and date to access a PDF file containing the issue. Click on The South Amboy Citizen (1944–2000) link to access files for this later period. Click on a year to access a PDF file of an individual issue.The issues may be searched by clicking on the binoculars icon on the left side of the page or by using the Find function under the Edit menu. Please note that the library’s website states that you will need the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the files properly.

Grosse Pointe Public Library, Michigan

Grosse Pointe is a small city that borders Detroit. It is located in Wayne County, Michigan. The Grosse Pointe Public Library has made a number of resources available on its website. The resources include a local history archive and an obituary index. Click on the Local History Archives icon on the homepage to access them.

There are a number of resources in the Local History Archives. They include books, photographs, maps, and newspapers, among other resources. Click on the Books icon to access three local histories. The following volumes have been digitized and are available as PDFs: A History of Agricultural School District 1; Grosse Pointe Guide and index; and The Mansions of Grosse Pointe. Click on the Photographs icon and then the Library thumbnail to view the nearly 50 historical photographs of the Grosse Pointe Public Library. There are a dozen historical images under the Maps link.

Click on the Grosse Pointe Obituary Index link to access the index main page. The database is an index to obituaries and other articles associated with deaths found in two local newspapers, the Grosse Pointe News and the Grosse Pointe Review. The index covers the period from 1940 through 2009 with a few records from 1930. Beginning with 1940, each segment of the index comprises a five-year period. Each section of the index is organized alphabetically. The data fields are last name, first name, middle name, date of death, printed (publication) date, newspaper title, and page.

On the Local History Archives page, you will find a link to Grosse Pointe newspapers that have been digitized and uploaded to the library's website. The digital collection includes Grosse Pointe News (1940–present), Grosse Pointe Review (1930–1952), and Grosse Pointe Civic News (1923–1934). You can find the full text of an obituary by using the information found in the index. First, click on the thumbnail link one of the newspapers. Click on the year, then the date of publication. This will open a PDF file of the complete issue of the selected newspaper. Instructions on the website provide information on how to search for specific items. You can also search the entire database by entering a single word or an exact phrase in the search box. You can limit your search to a specific time period by selecting a decade from the drop down list.

City of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

Regina is the capital of the province of Saskatchewan. It is located in the southern part of the province. The City of Regina owns and maintains two cemeteries - Riverside Memorial Park Cemetery and Regina Cemetery. City officials have uploaded a burial database for these cemeteries to the city’s website. The information in the database has been extracted from the official cemetery records held at the Cemetery Administration Office. The Riverside Memorial Park Cemetery database contains more than 34,000 records and the Regina Cemetery database contains nearly 10,000 records. Click on the Locate a Loved One link to access the cemetery database. Click on the Cemetery Database link to open the search page. You will also find links to cemetery maps in PDF format on the Locate a Loved One page.

The Online Cemeteries Database can be searched by last name, first name, year of death, age at death, and year interred. The search can be limited to a specific cemetery or you can search both cemeteries at the same time. The data fields in the search results are last name, first name(s), age at death, date of birth, date of death, date of burial, cemetery, and block-plot lot.

Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada

Neepawa is a town of about 4,000 residents, located in southern Manitoba. It was incorporated in 1883. The town of Neepawa has made the database for Riverside Cemetery available on its website. The earliest burial I found in the database occurred in 1877, and the most recent was in February 2013. According to the website, Riverside Cemetery is the furthest west location where a victim of the Titanic disaster was buried. Click on the search link. You may enter first names, last names, or a burial year in the search box. The data fields in the search results are last name, first/middle name, lot/block/range, and the interment date. If the deceased was an infant, it is noted on the name line. The search results are sorted by date.

Omaha Public Library, Nebraska

The city of Omaha is located in the eastern part of the state about midway along the Nebraska-Iowa border. It is the seat of Douglas County. On the genealogy page of the Omaha Public Library’s website are a number of unique online resources. Most of the following are projects of the Greater Omaha Genealogical Society. These include:

Omaha Births
This database comprises a list of births in Omaha extracted from area newspapers. In some cases, children were born in Omaha to families who lived in areas outside of Douglas County, including Iowa. Nebraska did not mandate the registration of births until 1910, making this information particularly valuable. The data fields in the database include name of parents, date, newspaper abbreviation, page number, and child’s name or sex, in cases where there is no given name for the child.

Omaha Obits
This index contains more than 120,000 obituaries and death notices extracted from pre-1977 Omaha newspapers. The database includes records that appeared in Omaha newspapers for individuals who lived within an hour to an hour and a half from the city. Civil War veterans from a further distance have also been included. The information has been drawn from obituaries, funeral stories, personal coverage, and death notices. The data provided includes name, age, date of publication, newspaper abbreviation, edition, page, and burial location, which is preceded by an @ symbol. There is a link to information on obtaining copies of the obituaries.

Marriage License Indexes for Douglas County, Nebraska
This link takes researchers to the Douglas County Clerk/Comptroller’s Office website, where you can search the county’s database of marriage license applications. Enter the name of the bride or groom into the search box. You must enter the full last name and at least the first letter of the first name. While the webpage states that only marriage licenses since 1988 are online, I found records with earlier dates listed in the Marriage License Archives section of the search results. The data fields include name, spouse name, marriage date, application date/year, and license number.

Crandon Public Library, Wisconsin

Crandon is located in Forest County, in northeastern Wisconsin. It is the county seat. The Crandon Public Library has made local history resources available on its website. The links to these collections are located in the Local History Holdings contents list on the right side of the webpage.

The library created and maintains the online Local History Obituary Database. The obituary data was extracted from the local newspaper, The Forest Republican. The database covers the following years: 1890–1925, 1992–1994, 2001–2003, and 2005– more recent years. Currently, there are 2,286 records in the database.

Scroll down to find the database search box, and enter a surname. The search results will appear below it. The data fields in the search results include last name, first name, age, newspaper, date of publication, and page and column number. Click on the up or down arrow in the column header to change the sort order. Select the number of records per page from the Show Entries drop down list. You may order photocopies of obituaries from the library by mail for a fee.

The library also has a digital collection of Crandon High School yearbooks on its website. Click on the Yearbook Collection link to access them. The collection contains yearbooks for the following years: 1938, 1943, 1945–1948, 1950–1951, 1953, 1955, 1958–1961, and 1963–1964. Click on the thumbnail images to view the entire yearbook page by page.

Door County Library Newspaper Archive

Door County is located in eastern Wisconsin. Its county seat is Sturgeon Bay. The county lies entirely on the Door Peninsula, which separates the southern part of Green Bay from Lake Michigan. The Door County Library has digitized and uploaded to its website more than sixty years of local newspapers. There are more than 6,300 issues from twelve newspapers published between 1862 and 1923. Select the Click Here to Continue link to access the database.

You can view the collections by clicking on the newspaper title link under the Browse Collections tab or by selecting a title from the Browse Titles link. Next, click on the thumbnail image of an issue. This will open the image viewer that will allow you to read the newspaper page by page. Click on the Simple Search tab to open the search page. Enter a keyword in the search box and click the search button. You can limit your search to a specific newspaper by selecting a title from the dropdown list. You can increase the number of search boxes to three by clicking on the + sign. Remove them by clicking on the – sign. Again, you need to click on the thumbnail image of the issue to read it.

McHenry County Genealogical Society, Illinois

McHenry County is located in northeast Illinois. Woodstock is the county seat. The McHenry County Genealogical Society has made a number of resources available on its website. Click on the Search Ancestors tab and choose from the drop down list to access them.

St. John the Baptist Catholic Church Records
Volume 1 of the Early Records of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, which covers the years 1852 to 1868, contains records from the registers of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials. In 1841 German immigrants organized the church in Johnsburg, Illinois. A permanent priest was not appointed until 1852, when official recordkeeping began. The registers have been translated from ecclesiastical Latin. Select the database from the drop down list and scroll through the records, which are in chronological order. There is also an online surname index. Click on the link to view it.

Newspaper Indexes

The Herald
The Herald newspaper began as the Nunda Herald and became the Crystal Lake Herald in 1908. There are two databases. The first is an index to death notices found in the newspaper from 1880 through 1979. (Issues from July 10, 1891, to July 14, 1893, and July 13, 1894, through July 4, 1895, are missing.) Clicking on the title link will allow you to access the records by selecting the first letter link of the deceased’s surname. This will open a new page with the alphabetical index. The fields in the database are name, age, death date, and information about the issue in which the notice was published. The second database is an index to marriage announcements for the same period; however, you must be a member of the McHenry County Genealogical Society to access the indexes after 1919. There are both brides and grooms indexes. Click on the title link to access the records by selecting the first letter link of the bride’s or groom’s surname.

Woodstock Sentinel
According to the website, the Woodstock Sentinel, which began publication in 1856, is the oldest newspaper being published in McHenry County. The database is an index to death notices that appeared in the newspaper between 1856 and 1894. Click on the first letter link of the deceased’s surname to open a new page with an alphabetical list. The data fields are surname, age, date of death, and date of issue.

Marengo Republican
This weekly newspaper began in 1867, then moved to Marengo a year later and took the name Marengo Republican. It ran until it was purchased in 1987. The index begins in 1872 and covers the remainder of the run. Click on the first letter link of the deceased’s surname to open a new page with an alphabetical list. The data fields are surname, age, date of death, and date of issue.

McHenry Plaindealer
The McHenry Plaindealer was first published in 1875. The database is an index to the death notices published from 1875 through 1880. A number of issues are missing between July 23, 1879 and May 12, 1880, and are not included in the index. Click on the first letter link of the deceased’s surname to open a new page with an alphabetical list. The data fields are surname, age, date of death, and date of issue.

You may purchase copies of the newspaper notices from the McHenry County Historical Society for a small fee.

In addition, the website includes other resources, such as every name indexes to the 1880 and 1930 federal censuses for McHenry County and names indexes to the MCIGS Connection Quarterly, the society’s publication.

The Historic Union Cemetery, Redwood City, California

The Union Cemetery is located in Redwood City, California, which is on the San Francisco Peninsula. It is the county seat of San Mateo County. The cemetery was established by May of 1859. By 1878 there had been nearly 400 interments, and specific large lots were designated for fraternal organizations and the Grand Army of The Republic (GAR). On the website’s main page you will find questions about an individual buried in the cemetery. Click on the Answer link to open the burial record page containing the answer to the question.

People
Click on the People link to open a new page to search for individuals buried in the cemetery. Then click on the Search the People Database. The database may be searched by first name, last name, year of death, and burial plot identifier. The search results include the name of the deceased, date of death, burial/plot identifier, and source of the information in the record. The date of death information varies. In many cases you will find only the year of death. Click on the name link to open a new page with more detailed information. The view location link will take you to a map showing the location of the plot. You will also find a list containing the names of individuals buried nearby and a list of individuals with the same last name buried there. In some cases you will find a transcription of the deceased’s obituary, links to external sites, photographs, and stories.

There are a number of other links on the main People page. These include People with Stories, People with Pictures, People with Find-A-Grave pages, and “All the People with Extra Information.” Click on the links to access lists with name links. Click on an individual’s name to view his or her webpage. The Find-A-Grave list includes links to each individual’s Find-A-Grave page. You can use the Fraternal Groups with Plots in the Union Cemetery link to access the following organizations: Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), People in the Free and Accepted Masons (Masons), United Ancient Order of Druids (Druids), and Improved Order of Red Men (RedMen). Clicking on these links will take you to each group’s pages, which contain a description of the organization, photographs, and name links for the members. Click on the link to view the members’ webpages.

Markers
This database catalogs many of the markers in the cemetery. The data fields include marker name, exists, photos, plot, people listed, and source. The data can be sorted by any of the fields just by clicking on the heading. Click on the “P” in the photos column to view the photograph. Each “P” is a link to a different image of the gravestone.

Archives
The Archives page contains links to a variety of resources, including maps of Redwood City, burial lists, newspapers and research, documents, The Journal of Local History, stories, and photographs.

Historical Newspaper Archives, Torrance Public Library, California

The city of Torrance is located in the southwestern region of Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1921. The Torrance Public Library has made available on its website a collection of resources related to the city’s history. This collaborative project involves the Torrance Historical Society, the Friends of the Library, and the City of Torrance.

The library’s website contains a newspaper database and a city/phone directory database. Both databases, which contain more than 100,000 digitized images, are full-text searchable via the same search function. Enter a keyword in the search box; choose the database to search, and number of results per page. The library staff has provided search strategies to help you get the best results. Click on the Advanced Search Tips to access them. You can also browse the individual newspapers and city/phone directories by date. Browse links may be found below the search box.

Historic Newspaper Archive
The newspaper database covers the period from 1913 through 1969. The database includes the following newspapers: The Torrance Press, originally The Peninsula Press (1949–1964), and The Torrance Herald (1914–1969). Click on the link in the search results to open a full-page image of the original newspaper in PDF format.

Historic City and Phone Directories
The Torrance and South Bay area city/phone directory databases cover various years between 1922 and 1975. Click on the link in the search results to open a full-page image of the original directory in PDF format.

Local History, La Crosse Public Library Archives, Wisconsin

The city of La Crosse is located in the southwestern part of Wisconsin, along the Mississippi River. It is the county seat of La Crosse County. The La Crosse Public Library Archives has many genealogy-related resources in its collections. Indexes to a number of them have been made available through a library database. Click on the local genealogy database to access the database. The resources include obituaries (1904–1960; 1968–1969; 1983–present); births (1987–present); marriages (1987–present); divorces (1992–present); and cemeteries.

The index is searchable by first name and last name. (Note that parents’ names should be used when searching births.) Select the database or databases that you want to search. You can also choose sort order, gender, and number of results returned from drop down lists. The data fields in the search results are name(s), event date, report date, and source. In the source field the data also includes the residence of the individual named in the record. The data fields in the cemeteries search results are name, birth, death, and cemetery. Click on the browse link to view a more detailed record, including remarks. Click on the cemetery name to open a new page with a brief history of the cemetery, including a map showing its location.

Fayetteville Public Library, Arkansas

Fayetteville is located in northwest Arkansas. It is the county seat of Washington County and home to the University of Arkansas. The Fayetteville Public Library has made resources from its Grace Keith Genealogical Collection available online. Click on the designated links in the center of the homepage to access them.

Fayetteville Public Library Genealogy Database
The Fayetteville Public Library genealogy database comprises three separate indexes. They are: Obituary Records, School Records, and Land Records. The Obituary Records index covers the period from 1868 through 2010. Click on the link to access the search page. Three newspapers have been indexed — Northwest Arkansas Times, Fayetteville Weekly Democrat, and Fayetteville Daily Democrat. The database can be searched by last name, first name, middle name/initial, date of birth, and date of death. The data fields are the same as the search fields plus newspaper title abbreviation and date. The School Records index covers the early years of the twentieth century. The database can be searched by surname and given name of the student and the surname and given name of the enroller. The data fields are surname and given name of the student, age/date of birth of the student, school name, district number, and the surname and given name of the enroller. The Land Records index covers the years 1830 through 1903. The database can be searched by grantor name (surname or full name), grantee name (surname or full name), and date. The data fields are grantor name, grantee name, claim type, date, and book and page number.

Washington County Land Records
Using this database, researchers can search Washington County land records for the period from 1834 to 1891. Select a search type — grantor or grantee — and enter a name in the search boxes. You can limit the search by document type — deeds, land, mortgages — or search all types at once. It is also possible to search the database by book and page numbers, if you know them. You can also choose to have the search results sorted by name or number. The data fields in the search results contain the document type, grantee’s name, grantor’s name, and book and page number. The book and page number field is an active link. Click on it to view the digitized document. Use the Return to Search Page link to return to the search results. Click on the volume and page number links at the bottom of the page to view the previous or next page in the volume.

Washington County Marriage Record Search
Washington County marriage records can be searched for the years 1845 to 1941. Select a search type — bride or groom — then enter a name in the search boxes. It is also possible to search the database by book and page numbers, if you know them. You can also choose to have the search results sorted by name or number. The data fields in the search results contain the bride’s full name, the groom’s full name, and the book letter and page number. The book and page field is an active link. Click on it to view the digitized document. Use the Return to Search Page link to return to the search results. Click on the volume and page links at the bottom of the page to view the previous or next page in the volume.