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Title Page Handbook of Macon County Missouri

Free County Histories of Missouri

The Missouri County History project, sponsored by the Missouri State Library and published by the Secretary of State for Missouri, has gathered county histories from all over the state.  There are currently 116 volumes in this collection.  Where counties are not covered specifically, there is usually some regional coverage. Some of the volumes cover several neighboring counties within one text.  The counties Carter, Christian, Howell, Oregon, Ozark, Ripley, Shannon, and Stone in the Ozarks region are documented in the collection, but not in individual county histories. An illustrated historical atlas of Callaway County, Missouri Compiled, drawn and published from personal …

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1970s Panorama of Prairie du Rocher

The History of an Illinois Town – Prairie du Rocher

AccessGenealogy has been working over the past year to compile early records and histories of French-American, Canadian-American towns and settlements that presents a look into the early history of this ethnic group of people as they were some of the earliest settlers in the Midwest, settling and trading in Native American towns long before the English were present in the area. Our American history, though, so perpetuated by English roots, often forgets this settlement of people, and their contribution to what is now America. The latest offering takes a look at the oldest European settlement in Illinois: Prairie du Rocher. …

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Gazetteer of the United States of America

Dang those old towns!

Dang those old towns! I find that nothing is more irritating then having FamilyTreeMaker tell me a location doesn’t exist. But then I remind myself, FTM’s quirky database is built on the geographical location today, not the location at the time the event occurred. A lot of those older smaller post offices used as locations in the olden days have simply vanished. Sometimes those small towns just disappeared from history. Maybe they were flooded out… maybe people just got up and left… often they simply changed their name. Today, if the remnants of the towns buildings still stand we call …

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Old Fulton New York Post Cards

New York Newspaper Images Treasure Trove

Quirky would be an understatement in describing the featured site of the week, Old Fulton New York Post Cards. Deceptive is also another word that comes to mind, but not in a bad way. It’s deceptively good. See, the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website actually has little to do with postcards or Fulton county, though both can be found within. What it is is a treasure trove of free newspaper images stored online in pdf format, and easily downloadable and viewable. At current count they have 609 titles (mostly New York, but they appear to be branching out), …

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City Directories of New Bern, North Carolina 1911-1963

City directories are primarily useful for locating people in a particular place and time. They can tell you generally where an ancestor lived and give an exact location for census years. They are also useful for linkage with sources other than censuses. Generally a city directory will contain an alphabetical list of its citizens, listing the names of the heads of households, their addresses, and occupational information. Sometimes the wife’s name will be listed in parentheses or italics following the husband’s. Often, dates of deaths of individuals listed in the previous year’s directory are listed as well as the names …

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