I've been feeling a bit guilty because I haven't made any major breakthroughs with immigration research in my family tree. Several of my lines are once again at brick walls, so instead of dwelling on this, I've been focusing on exploring local genealogy collections. Last week, I visited the Columbus Family History Center, and today I dropped in at the Edinburgh Public Library. Both have great resources and unique collections.
At the Columbus Family History Center, they provide free access to eleven different subscription databases. Since I am already familiar with Ancestry.com and Heritage Quest, I skipped over those and decided to try out the other nine. World Vital Records didn't appear to have that much coverage of birth, marriage, and death records for Indiana counties, but they do have many years of the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne city directories, plus many Indiana county histories. I found some directory listings to pursue further. Both Fold 3 and The American Civil War databases had references to my Civil War ancestor, Jasper N. Gibson. The other databases include three with UK/British records and newspapers, another with Swedish records (in Swedish only), Historic Map Works, and Paper Trail which includes American pioneer trail documents. In addition to access to the entire microfilm collection of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the Columbus Family History Center has a small print collection, focused on Bartholomew and surrounding counties. Once again, I could have been there much longer trying out these databases, but time was limited.
After hearing many positive reviews about the genealogy room at the Edinburgh Public Library, I wanted to see it for myself. Their collection focuses on the Town of Edinburgh, Indiana which is located in three counties. Naturally, this makes it important for the collection to have resources for Johnson, Bartholomew, and Shelby counties. The resources don't stop there, but include many other Indiana counties and feeder states. I spent some time examining their Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee books. I found two books about the WPA inventories of county archives in Kentucky and Indiana. Studying the pages I photocopied should help me learn more about probate courts in both states. My hope is that I can break down some brick walls through finding probate, guardianship, and other court records.
Both visits were helpful in that I now have more resources to consider for research, whether they are subscription databases or court records. I would definitely try out World Vital Records database again when I'm better prepared to research foreign records. There were several Indiana counties' books that I'd take a closer look at in Edinburgh Public Library's Genealogy Room.
