Lesson 9 History and Genealogy

 Basic Discovery Exercise

AncestryLibrary

Searching My Name

My name came up with two records from two previous residents in South Dakota. When I clicked on those records I was able to find a couple of more records for residents in Illinois. I could not come up with my marriage license. There seems to be only a few state records showing up. Illinois and Colorado were two states not showing records.  

Grandparent Search

Kenefick is an uncommon name. There are very few of us in the United States. I search for my grandfather and I did find my grandparents marriage license. I did not find their death certificates. I think I would have to do some more digging to find more records. I was really neat to see the actual license.

South Dakota

The results show 220,983,931 results. The first bunch was professional baseball pictures. Most of these were team shots. After the professional baseball pictures were page after page of links to school yearbooks. The one picture I did look at was Raleigh Aitchison who played for Brooklyn Nationals in 1887. This was a two page image with individual player shots on the first page and a team picture on the second. A lot of primary documents here.

HertiageQuest

HeritageQuest consisted of five main tabs: Census, books, Persi, Freedman’s and Revolutionary War. I looked up my last name in all of them. Under the books tab I did find a M. R. Kenefick who was a prominent banker and citizen of Dell Rapids. I’m fairly sure he was a great uncle. Under the census tab I did find some results. Prior to 1940 there were only a few states listed. It looks like HertiageQuest is working on adding more census data.

Sanborn Maps

In Sanborn Maps I looked up Rapid City. I looked up the oldest map which was October of 1835. About the only thing recognizable were the streets. So I focus on the corners of 6^th / Main and 5^th / Main. That is where the Alex Johnson Hotel is. I did ten year jumps. The first map Alex Johnson appears is the September of 1930 map. Looking on the Alex Johnson’s website I found that it was built in 1927.

The navigation panel for Sanborn is a little clunky. The first views are so small you can’t read anything. Then once you zoom in the arrow keys to move up or down or sideways jump too far. After a little practice a user can get the hang of it. I really like maps and it was fun looking at old maps.

Common Core Connections

5.RI.9 Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably.

AncestryLibrary, HeritageQuest and Sanborn Maps are sophisticated and specific search tools. There intent is for experience researchers that are looking for specific things like my Aunt that is mapping out my mom’s side of the family history. Since I teach in an elementary school I feel fifth graders would be about the youngest students to attempt using these research tools with.

The lesson I could see doing would for students to start out similar to our basic discovery exercise. The students would begin with looking themselves up in AncestryLibrary then tracing their family tree a couple of generation. Then within HertiageQuest see if they can find collaborative evidence that supports their findings in AncestryLibrary. The final step would be to find within Sanborn maps of the towns their ancestor lived in at the time they lived. The final product for this could be some type of digital presentation like Prezi or Powerpoint.