Monday, March 12, 2007

USGenWeb Pages search for Cornelia

One of the items on my "to-do" list for the online records search for my Cornelia Bresee (and her ancestry) was to search the USGenWeb pages for data. Earlier, I searched the USGenWeb Archives (housed on Rootsweb) using the Rootsweb search engine.

I first went to the USGenWeb page for New York state - at http://www.rootsweb.com/~nygenweb/. This page has a number of links for statewide indexes. One that caught my eye was the tombstone transcription project - so I looked at that for Rensselaer and Columbia Counties (note that these cemetery records are also accessible from the County pages). The Columbia County list is very sparse. The Rensselaer County tombstone list has 93,000 entries in the tombstone index, including lots of Brees/variants.

On the Columbia County NY USGenWeb site - at http://www.rootsweb.com/~nycolumb/ - there are lists of repositories and some links to resources, but there is not a comprehensive list of resources by subject (e.g., births, marriages, deaths, census, etc.). I searched most of the links and found nothing that helps me on the Bresee/variants surname.

On the Rensselaer County NY USGenWeb site - at http://www.rootsweb.com/~nyrensse/ - I found a very well organized site with well-populated databases. I didn't find anything useful, but I did enjoy searching through the queries, biographies, births, marriages, deaths, etc.

At both sites, I did note the local historical and genealogical societies that might hold resources on my Bresee family (thanks to Miriam for the research tip!).

1 comment:

Miriam Robbins said...

Randy, USGenWeb now has a its own state-wide and project-wide search engine system. You can see it here at http://www.usgenweb-search.us/. Not all states are represented yet, but they have been adding them very quickly.