Welcome. I'm Byron Holdiman. I'm going to be your presenter this afternoon for Hidden Treasures in the Library of Congress. It's great to see so many of you out here. And it's great to be at a conference like this, where there is so many genealogy fanatics. I feel like I'm around family. [LAUGHTER] And with the Family Tree app, I found out that I am. [LAUGHTER]

For the past 13 years, I have worked with the Library of Congress on a grant project at two different universities--California University of Pennsylvania and Quincy University of Illinois--helping teachers use historical documents in their classroom to engage their students. Now, being a genealogist in background myself, as I am going through helping teachers use these documents, I found how many of these documents actually can be used for us to help us with our family trees. So I'm going to be sharing those experiences with you today. The Library of Congress is that--it's the library for Congress. It started in 1800, as Congress decided they needed a library to help them research laws that they would pass during congressional sessions. In 1814 it had only been open for about 14 years. The British came in during the War of 1812 and burned the White House and the Capitol building. They actually used the books of the Library of Congress as kindling to start the Capitol building on fire.

This put Congress in a situation. They still felt like they needed a library to create laws, especially at a time when we are at war. But there was no way for them to get books from Europe over here. So Thomas Jefferson stood up and offered to sell his personal library to Congress. This is important because it made a change to the Library of Congress. Thomas Jefferson did not just have law books. He loved the word in written form. So anything that was in print, he collected it. Congress wanted a law library, but this was a fantastic deal for Congress. And so they decided to buy his collection. That moved the Library of Congress from being a law library to becoming a generalized library.

That move continued in 1870, when Congress passed a act that centralized the copyright regulations from the U.S. district courts around the country to one place--the Library of Congress. What that meant is to hold copyright on something that you wrote, you would have to send two copies to the Library of Congress. So if somebody wrote a family history, two copies were sent to the Library of Congress to hold copyright on that. If someone wrote a county history--which a few years later, as we entered the centennial of their country, a lot of counties wrote a county history--those were sent to the Library of Congress. Somebody spending time indexing marriage records, probate records, cemeteries--they want to have copyright on that. So they sent those to the Library of Congress. What this means is all these books were available at the library for you to research. When I was a student at Brigham Young University as a genealogy major, we learned about the Library of Congress and all of the wonderful books that were there. So when I first went to Washington, D.C., I made sure that I made a stop at the Library of Congress. And I went to the Local History Genealogy Reading Room and was able to find all this great material. I looked up for genealogies, and I found a genealogy on the Holdiman family. I found a genealogy on my Welks family. I looked in the local histories and found all these great biographical sketches on my family. I looked in the indexes of these records and found all of these records that I needed to order on microfilm when I got home. I found so much great material on my family. It was a fantastic trip. And I would highly recommend people going to the Library of Congress. But later on, as I started working on the grant project, I realized there's a lot more than books at the Library of Congress.

So as I had mentioned, I worked with teachers, helping them use historical documents in their classroom.

This specific project that I'm going to talk about at this point, now, was two teachers in Pike County, Illinois, that had developed a lesson in reading Sarah, Plain and Tall, by Patricia MacLachlan. The fifth grade teacher had her students go into to the Library of Congress, find materials that related with the book, and then take those materials to the special ed students. And they read the book to the special ed students using these images, newspaper articles, that related to the book Sarah, Plain and Tall. It was such a fantastic lesson that when they came back and told me about it, I told them, "You need to go to the Illinois Reading Council Conference and present this." So I had them write a proposal. They submitted their proposal. And they got notice that their proposal was accepted, and they were presenting at IRC.

So two weeks later, they get another letter. This time, the letter was from Patricia MacLachlan, the author of Sarah, Plane and Tall. We didn't realize she was going to be a keynote speaker at the conference. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, so the letter was that she had heard that they were presenting on her book and she wanted to know if she could attend the session. [LAUGHTER] These teachers--I had to persuade them to submit it anyway. Now, they were really freaking out. [LAUGHTER] So they invited me down to Pike County, Illinois, to go over what they were going to be presenting. So we were looking at some of the materials that their students had found, and one of it was this picture here, called, Three Motherless Children and a Caved-In Soddy. Where it really got my interest was when we went to the bibliographic details. There's a George Barnes, Custer County, Nebraska. My great-great-grandfather is George Barnes of Custer County, Nebraska. And so I told them, "I don't know if this is my ancestor or not. I need to go home and find out if it is." So then I went home and did a search. I have made the mistake before of realizing that there were two people with the same exact name in a county, and I grabbed the wrong one as my ancestor--John Holdiman of Schuylkill County. So I decided, "Okay, I better check and make sure that this is my ancestor." So I went home, looked in the records. I could only find one George Barnes in Custer County, Nebraska, at that time. So then I compared to my family group sheet. Now, I've added the picture of him in there since then. At that time, we did not have a picture of my great-great-grandfather. So you have the father, George Washington Barnes. They had three children. The three oldest children were one year apart. So at this time, they would be five, four, and three. Jeryl would be five. Franklin was three. And my great-grandmother, [? Lula ?] Alberta Barnes, was two years old. It matches exactly with the family. So this actually was a picture of my family and a picture of my great-great-grandfather, which I had never had before. I started thinking, "If this is in the Library of Congress, what else is available on the website that is about my family." When I went to the Library of Congress, I went to the Local History and Genealogy Room, looked at all those great books. But there's also newspapers. There's international collections. Maybe there's something on them when they were over in Europe. American Folklife Center, with oral histories, manuscripts--maybe there's a letter out there. Prints and photographs--we did see a photograph. Recorded sound. At the end, I will talk about someone here whose family did find something in the recorded sounds. So I'm going to take you to the Library of Congress website and show you some items that you can search for and that possibly you can find your own family. The one thing I do want to point off with the Library of Congress's website is it's not like searching FamilySearch or Ancestry or MyHeritage or any of the other great and wonderful genealogy databases. The Library of Congress is not created for genealogy. So what we're going to be searching for in a moment is bibliographic details that's about each item.

Okay, and maybe I have to actually close out of the--okay.

The library's website is www.loc.gov. It's a free website provided by the government.

At the top here is a search, where you can search across the whole website. So that's why I'm going to do to begin with. I'm going to put in the last name Barnes. If you have a unique last name, you could put that in. So I put it in "Barnes." And I have Albert Barnes, Djuna Barnes, a Barnes family history, Agnes Barnes. I don't recognize any of these names. So because of that, I'm going to go ahead and put a location with it. So I'm going to put "Custer, Nebraska."

Search. What it does then is it finds the bibliographic details; it looks for the word "Barnes," "Custer," and "Nebraska." Then once I have all three words in it, are going to be at the top of the list. Then it will search for two of the words and then one of the words. So the most relevant material is going to be at the top of your list. So here, I do have four photographs. The fourth photograph is one that we looked at earlier. Now, if I pull out my family group sheets, I would realize that John W. Barnes and Walter A. Barnes are brothers to George Barnes. The next one here, the second item, is Peter M. Barnes. Peter M. Barnes and Eunice Rodin are the parents of George Barnes. So now, I had my second great-grandparents, my second great-grandfather. Now, I have a picture of my third great-grandparents, and in between them is their dog. [LAUGHTER]

The great thing with this is it takes that pedigree chart that I'd consider a skeleton, and it takes those skeletons of names, dates, places, and starts putting people to it. And it makes that skeleton become real people and helps make a connection to your ancestors.

All right, I'm going do another search here on Will County, Illinois--another area where my family is from. I'd mention that the family has to be in the bibliographic details. These photos--they were because it was of the Barnes family. So the word "Barnes" was in the bibliographic detail. But maybe there's some material out there about your family that's not all about your family, maybe about people within that area. So I'm going to do Will County, Illinois, do a search. The first thing that comes up is a map. So I'm going to click on that map. I'm going to click on it again to get a larger view of it.

And it should come up here.

Okay, I'm going to try a different way here and see if this works.

Okay, this is coming. It is going to be slow though. All right. So as this is coming, I'll talk a little bit about it. I know from the census records that my family came from Wheatland Township in Will County. What is coming up here is what's called a plat map. It outlines everybody who owned property in Will County. So if I bring up Wheatland Township--and I'm not sure if this is going to let me zoom in.

Okay, I'm going to go ahead and stop this one here.

I do have this in the PowerPoint.

So if I go into Wheatland Township and I zoom in, then I can look for my family. Now, I have my family here.

And let's see.

Oh, here we go. So they're up here. Here's Daniel Holderman. Let me go back for a moment. Daniel Holderman is my fourth great-grandfather. Now, if I was to search "Holdiman," I wouldn't have found it anyway. Because [INAUDIBLE] Holderman. Jane Holdiman, Debra Holterman can verify that the name has taken on many variations over time. At this time, part of the time it's Holderman; part of the time it's Holdiman. So we have Daniel Holderman. A couple of places over is Joseph, which is my great-great-grandfather. And a couple over from that is a brother, John. His property is also surrounded by Amos Wolf, John Book, John Basche, John Lance. These are all son-in-laws of Daniel Holdiman's.

I was then able to take this map and, using photo-editing software, go to Google Maps, find Wheatland County, cut that out, and then overlay on top of that Wheatland Township from the old map to be able to find out where they actually lived. So 248th Avenue, outside of Naperville, between Naperville and Plainfield, goes through the property. Their property is bordered by West 111th Street and 119th Street to the South.

So now, I actually have gone there, and driven around, saw the area. Commissioners Park of Naperville is actually a part of the family farm. And so someday I actually want to have a family reunion in Commissioner Park, where the family actually owned property at one time.

Let me end this for a moment and go back to the library's web site and go back in my search. Okay, so that was a map. Down below that is a family history or a local history. My family had left by 1890s, so my family is not in that one. Below that are Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for the towns in the area. The Library of Congress has scanned all those in. Those are also a great item to look out for your family and the areas that they lived in. All right, there's this one local history here. Now, it's too late for my family. My family had moved on to Iowa by this time. But I'm going to see if there's any other books. So on the left-hand side, I can refine my search. So I'm going to limit this to just books. So I click on it, and now I have several local histories in the area. So I'm going to do a search in the next one because some of my family was still there in 1878. So I click on it. When you click on it, it brings up what's called a bibliographic record. Or it should. [LAUGHTER] There it goes. If you look at this, you're going to think, "Oh no, they don't have this book. I have to go to the Library of Congress to read it," and you give up on it. Don't give up. Under Links, there are actually two different links that will lead you to the book. The first link, the hdl.loc.gov, leads you to archive.org, where the Library of Congress has scanned in their copy of the book and has put it on to archive.org. The second one is HathiTrust.

I have found, actually, the archive.org one to be easier to use, so that's the one I'm going to go into. So I click on it. And it'll bring up the book. Do not click up here and search. This will search across all the books that all these libraries around the world have added to archive.org. I just want to search this book, so I want to click on the magnifying glass that's down by the book here.

Now it says up here, "Search inside this book." Now I can search inside the book. So I'm going to type in the name "Holdiman," do a search. It'll search through. And let's see if this already comes up here. Now, what I've done is--like on the cooking shows, when they put something in the oven, they pull something out that's done. [LAUGHTER] It takes about two to three minutes to search through the book. So to save some time, so you don't have to sit there and watch the screen, it points out, at the bottom here, every place where the word "Holdiman" appears in the book. This one here appears once. I hover over it. It gives me the excerpt of where "Holdiman" appears. It's Miss Elizabeth Holdiman, who was married to Daniel Lance. When I was pointing out the map before, I had pointed out one of the properties was Daniel Lance. So I click on this. It turns me right to that page.

And then I can go up here to zoom and zoom into the article. Elizabeth's brother, who was my ancestor, Joseph Holdiman, married Catherine Lance. Catherine is Daniel and John's sister. So now, there are two bibliographic sketches of her brothers.

The one that really had helped me out with finding this is it mentions in Daniel's that he is the son of Peter and Catherine Shelley Lance, which I knew that, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Father was a farmer--died in Pennsylvania at the age of 53. I did not know when he had died. So now I have the age that he died that I could calculate his death date. And then his mother came west to Will County, and died in 1870 at 73 years of age. In 1860 I had found her in the Erie, Pennsylvania, census. I thought she had died in Erie, Pennsylvania. This tells me that she actually came, died in 1870. She must have died before the census, because I did not find her in the 1870 census. So this, then, had me totally change where she died. And now I actually had a year that she died.

All right, I'm going to do another location search. I'm going to search "Washington County, Pennsylvania."

All right, so if you limit it to something--like I had limited it to books; it's only searching books right now. So I'm going to change this to All Formats.

It searched across all formats. The first thing that comes up are what's called bird's-eye-view maps. And I'm not going to click on here, because we've already had problems with a map. [LAUGHTER] But these bird's-eye view maps--you had an artist come to your town. He walks the street, do semisketches of every building in the town, goes back, does his artwork in a full-sized map of the city. Then they would print that off, return to the town, and sell those for people to frame and put on their walls. This was common in the 1860s up to the early 1900s. Every house in the town is drawn out in this map. And so you can see what the houses were like and how the town was set up at that time. If we weren't having problems with the loading, I would bring it up and show you what California University of Pennsylvania was like in 1900, when it was the California Normal School, which was a teachers school. California University of Pennsylvania has nothing to do with the state of California. It's because it was in the town of California, Pennsylvania. All right, now, before, I did a search on formats and was able to limit it to books. This time I'm going to do a search by time period. So let's say my family lived here in the 1860s. So I click in the 1800s to the 1899s. And then I can limit it again to the 1860s. And now it just brings up items from the 1860s in Washington County, Pennsylvania. The first one is in the Abraham Lincoln Papers. It's a letter from the citizens of Washington County, Pennsylvania, to Abraham Lincoln on Thursday, August 28, 1862. There are 22 pages.

And I can bring up each page individually here. And let me go ahead and zoom into this. And hopefully, in a moment, it'll zoom in and you can actually see.

This letter was at the time that the Emancipation Proclamation had gone through. The president wrote it. He had sent it on to Congress. They had passed it. It is now sitting on his desk. And he's not sure if he actually wants to make this a law. And so the citizens of Washington County are sending him a letter saying they think this a great idea, that he does make this a law. So here we have signatures--22 pages of citizens in Washington County. The thing that amazes me is there's a men's column and a lady's column. [LAUGHTER] How many of you have a signature from an ancestor in the 1860s? And right here on this document.

All right, so I'm going to go back up here to the top. If you ever click in and go from here to here to here and here, and then you get lost in the Library of Congress, that's very possible. [LAUGHTER] There are 51 million items at the website. It is so easy to get lost in it. Look for the Library of Congress logo at the top. If you click on that, that'll take you back to the home page, like I just did.

Now, sometimes with 51 million items, it may be too much of a needle in a haystack of doing a search and trying to find your family. So you may want to go into the digital collections. There are three hundred different digital collections. And you may want to look into just one of these collections. One of them that's common for genealogy is the Historic American Buildings Survey. People have gone all over the United States taking pictures of historic buildings--these could be famous buildings, local buildings, homes--took pictures of the building itself but also have gone inside, taking pictures of different architectural features in the building. There are sketches of the buildings. There are blueprints of the layout of the buildings. There is historic information about the buildings. When I showed this at one session in Washington County, Pennsylvania, somebody in Washington, Pennsylvania's, grandfather had built a building. The building is no longer there. And she was all excited because that building was in that group of pictures.

I'm going to take us into the Farm Security Administration photographs.

During the Depression, the government started Work Progress Administration projects to be able to put people to work who were unemployed. They sent famous photographers around to take pictures of what it was like in the Depression. Those pictures were sent back to Congress, select few of those, and they would bring WPA projects then to the area to help bring employment to the area. So one of your ancestors may have had their picture taken by one of these people, such as Dorothy Elaine.

So at the top here, once I've gone into the collection, I can type in a name and a place to see if they're there. So I'm going to search "Polly in Iowa." And I do a search. And there are pictures of the Earl Polly family. So there's a picture of the house that they lived in, a picture of their baby in a crib.

And let me see if it'll allow me to go in for a better picture for this one. Actually, let's try that one.

Kids at the door. Kids eating at the table. Kids playing outside. This one here actually has a picture of the mother and the kids standing in the doorway.

For a long time, the one titled Christmas Dinner in Home of Earl Polly, that was the one that was sent to Congress. That was the one that people had access to. The rest of the pictures that Russell Lee took at that time were put in the archives at the Library of Congress. Then when the library decided to scan these in, they scanned in the pictures and put them up. And now, you have access to the whole collection, not just the one that Russell Lee sent to Congress.

All right, I'm going back to the digital collections and point out a couple more.

So down here, towards the bottom, a little higher. Here we go. Ansel Adams that's famous for taking nature pictures also went to Manzanar Japanese American internment camp and took pictures of those who were in the internment camp. So if you have family that was at Manzanar, this is a great collection to go in and see if your family was captured on photography by Ansel Adams.

I'm going to go to the next page.

And there are 311 different items here, all alphabetized. So you'd have to go through and just see what different collections there are. But the one I'm going into next is Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project.

When the Depression hit and the government started WPA projects, they went to the Library of Congress and asked them to start a project that would hire authors who were not employed because their books weren't selling. So they decided to start the Federal Writers' Project. These authors then went around the country. They first started interviewing former slaves and catching their stories. That then moved into where they just traveled the country. They would literally drive all day, stop, stay at somebody's house, the next morning interview someone in that town, and then drive on and stop, interview someone in the next town. And they would just do this all the way across the country. So one of your ancestors may be in the Federal Writers' Project.

One of the things that I've done with the grant project is teach summer workshops for teachers. And one of them is called Slave versus Free that looks at slavery in Missouri, and the Underground Railroad movement in Illinois.

So we started off the workshop by going to a slave cemetery in Ralls County, Missouri.

They used to have wooden crosses. Those wooden crosses have been replaced with these cement crosses. But the cement crosses in the slave cemeteries have no names. So you don't know who is actually buried in those lots. Right next to it is the white cemetery, which has the traditional tombstones that we think of. Now, one year when I was doing this, I actually came down sick, ended up in hospital. And one of the people that I work with just did a great job in taking over the workshop for me. And so while they were there, they decide to get one of the wooden crosses that had just been thrown over the fence. And they brought to me, in the hospital, a wooden cross. [LAUGHTER] My wife thinks that's morbid. I think it's one of the greatest gifts I ever got. [LAUGHTER]

So what I've done is I've found three slave narratives. The people were interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project from this area. I split the teachers into three different groups. They're given one of the interviews. And they go off to some corner, and they read and discuss that interview that they have. That's a very powerful experience to start off the workshop.

Normally, they go off into a section of the slave area, and they sit down, and they read these interviews. One group, for some reason, decided to go off into the white section. One of the reasons, they told me, they went off over there is because the other two groups were being too noisy and they wanted it to be more quiet. But they went over. They sat down. They started reading their narrative. Their narrative was on Henry Dant. Henry Dant says in his narrative that he was a slave in the Judge Daniel Kendrick farm.

They were sitting next to the family plot of the Kendrick family. All of a sudden, someone looked over, saw that they were sitting next to the Kendricks, and she said, "I need to go get Mr. Holdiman." So she came over and said, "Come over. I have something to show you." I'm thinking, "What?" I'm thinking, "Did they find a Holdiman?" [LAUGHTER] We went over, and they showed me that they were sitting next to the white family that owned Henry Dant. The following year we did the same thing: gave it out, the teachers read it in the cemetery, had a great experience. I go home that night, watching the ten o'clock news. And they're doing an interview about an African American museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

And I'm thinking, "Wow, we need to go to that." So I sent off the email thinking, "Okay, it's late. She'll probably not get it. But I'll send it to her anyway." So I sent off the email telling her what we were doing. And she wrote back right away and said, "Yes, I want to see you guys tomorrow. Bring your teachers on over." And she signed it "Faye Dant." And so I'm thinking right way she has to be a relation to Henry Dant. So we went the next morning. As soon as she introduced herself to the group, the teachers had the question right away "Are you related to Henry Dant?" And she says, "Well, yes I am"--and this is her husband in the picture below with her--"That's my husband's great-great-grandfather." And they said, "We read his narrative in the cemetery the other day." And then she talked about how grateful that the family is that someone from the Federal Writers' Project came to Hannibal, Missouri, and recorded his story. And she said, "We know about his life as a slave because they recorded that story."

All right, so I'm going to go back to the website.

And I'm going to click on Born in Slavery. You could put someone's name in. Or you could put a location. I put "Rolls County, Missouri," when I did my search, because I was trying to find people from Rolls County, Missouri. But if I did a search for "Dant," it tells me that there is a Dant in the Missouri project here. So I click on that. There are 389 pages of slave narratives from Missouri. So I click. I notice that there's an index here. So I can go to the index. And I can zoom in. And here I have Henry Dant, page 98. So I'm going to change this to page 98. And actually, this isn't page 98. This is image 98. So it's not going to take me right to page 98 right away. I'm going to go to it. I see I'm actually on page 93. So I'm just going click over to the next until I'm at page 98.

And now here I'm at Henry Dant of Hannibal, Missouri, and with his slave narrative. Most of these are written. There are a few that are sound recorded though. Now, the recording devices that they had in the 1930s is nothing like they are today. So it's not the clearest sound. But for one of you to be able to even hear an ancestor tell about his slave or her slave experience would be a fantastic thing to have.

All right, I'm going to go back to the Library of Congress and back to the digital collections. And the next thing I'm going to go into are the newspapers.

The Library of Congress has images to newspapers from 1789 to 1963. Most of the papers from 1923 to the present are not available online because of copyright restrictions. There are a few newspapers though that have allowed the Library of Congress to put their newspapers up there. So most of what you're going to be searching is going to be before 1923. If you have an uncommon surname, you can just type that in. So I'm going to type in the name of "Drebis" and click Go.

And it brings up 715 items with the word "Drebis" in it. Now, I'm going to go ahead narrow this down to Washington State and click Go.

And if I want to, I could also narrow it down by a specific range of years. I'm not going to worry about that. And then I can change relevance to date to put in date order.

So if I click on this first one here.

And I'm going to zoom in on it.

And it highlights the word in red. We have "Ladies find worse plaid dress." [LAUGHTER]

One point I want to bring up what this is this is OCRed. Nobody has gone through and verified that what the computer said the word is, is what it really is. The computer said the word was "Drebis." The word was actually "dress." So sometimes you're going to find things are not even related to your family, such as here. This is about a dress, not about the Drebis family. But I did want to point that off just so when you come across things like that, that it makes sense what's going on. Now I'm going to go into--I think it's April 13 of 1906--yeah, "Fred A. Drebis versus Ella Drebis, action for divorce and custody of children." Because of this event, I knew nothing about my Drebis family.

This is my great-great-grandmother. My great-grandmother was three years old at the time. And after the divorce, she ended up moving, my great-grandmother, to northern Idaho. And he was still in southern Washington. My grandmother only met her grandfather, Fred Drebis, once in her life. At that point, he owned a store in Centralia, Washington. My grandmother--they went to Centralia, Washington, spent about an hour with her grandfather in the store, and then they went back to Idaho. And that was the only time my grandmother got to meet her grandfather. So when I went through these papers, I found a whole bunch of articles about Fred Drebis. We did not realize Fred Drebis was a famous horticulturalist. He had created all these different types of apples. Every year his apples won awards at the Washington State Fair. So there are articles and articles about his apples. The one thing, though, that I do want to point out here--and I'm going to go on to page 5 of the newspaper items here.

And on the fifth page of newspapers, there is a specific one where he was running for county commissioner and took out an ad in the paper. And he put his photograph in the ad. So this is my great-great-grandfather and the first time we had a picture of him.

Some of these papers, especially small-town papers, which he was in small town--anything was news. One of them--his mom had come in on the train. They say, "Mrs. Drebis has come in on the train today. We'll have to meet with Frederick tomorrow to find out why his mom is in town." [LAUGHTER]

There's messages about who they had over for Sunday dinner or who they had coming to play pinochle. These little tidbits of news adds life to their daily activities.

All right, I'm going to do one more search in here. This time, I'm going to go to the advanced search. In the advanced search, if you know the newspaper of where your family was--it has been digitized--you can actually go directly to that paper. So I'm going to go to the Custer County Nebraska Republican.

And they keep adding more and more, so it's taking me longer to get down there.

Okay, so then I could click on the paper. I'm going to do the search on the word "lightning" and with the phrase, or words next to each other, of "Reverend Ward." The family story that I was always told is that one of my ancestors, William Haden Ward, was a minister and that he was coming home from church one Sunday, and he was struck by lightning and was killed. And so the family joke was, what was he preaching that Sunday? [LAUGHTER]

So when I realized that Custer County, Nebraska, papers was in here, I decided to do a search and see if I can find the obituary.

Okay, let's see here.

Okay, l-i-g-h-t-- [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Huh? e-n. e-n. No, i-n. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Okay.

All right, I'm not sure why it's not coming up now. If you start to type it, it will come up in your timeline. Okay.

Nope, I don't think it's either of those. Okay, let me do this one. All right.

Oh, I see what's wrong. I'm stuck in Washington County. So I need go back to all states. Okay, back to advanced search, all states, Custer County.

Okay.

[INTERPOSING VOICES] I think it is with the "e," though. But let me see. Yeah, and maybe they misspelled it in the newspaper article. [LAUGHTER]

Okay, they did misspell it in the newspaper article. [LAUGHTER] So it is right at the top and wrong in the bottom.

"Reverend W. H. Ward, of Round Valley, is reported to have been killed Tuesday by lightening. He was at work in the field with his team when it began to rain drove to the barn where he was struck by lightening. Mr. Ward is an old settler of the county and was universally respected by all who knew him." So suddenly, here I realized it was Tuesday. He wasn't coming home from church. He was out on the field working. A lot of times--and even the history of our country has been this way--we tend to twist the story to make it even better. [LAUGHTER] And I'm sure that's what has happened here. Somehow over time, they twisted--he was a minister. He was struck by lightning. If we make it on Sunday, it's going to be a better story. [LAUGHTER]

So a lot of times when you start going through the newspaper and start finding these resources, you're going to realize that the story may not be exactly as your family has told you. Each of these items, though, adds life to those names, dates, places that's on my pedigree chart and makes these people real.

Going back to the Library of Congress, there were newspapers with my family in it. I didn't look in those newspapers when I was there. There were photographs. Sister Allen here had told me an experience of her husband's grandmother. Her husband's grandmother had written some songs. Somebody actually came out here to Utah and recorded her singing those songs. And those are in the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress provided, at no cost, the recording to her family. And now she's made those available on FamilySearch. There's lots of material, whether it be in the Library of Congress or other archives. Library of Congress does have a genealogy section. But some of these other places that have archives, if you go in and say, "Oh, I'm here to do genealogy," they're going to tell you, "Oh, we don't have genealogy." But each piece of paper in that place, each picture, is about a person. That person could be your family. So maybe it's not labeled "genealogy," but there is lots of genealogy material out there. So I hope this was able to help. I'm going to go ahead and open up for questions. But also, before we go into questions, let me bring this back up here.

If you could go on your app, you can click on the clipboard and you can leave a survey about what you felt about the workshop. That will give the conference an idea of what type of things you want to hear about. So before you leave, make sure you do that. But I want to open the time up now for questions. Since this is a recording, I am going to repeat your question. And yeah. Back here. First, the guy, and then the lady next to him. [INAUDIBLE] whether [INAUDIBLE] reports [INAUDIBLE] and Native American [INAUDIBLE] get a hold of [INAUDIBLE] laws that are passed [INAUDIBLE]. He's asking about Native American research in the Library of Congress. There are photographs from Native American tribes. There are papers of when Lewis and Clark went on their expedition and meeting with Native Americans. The other great place to look though is the National Archives. A lot of that is also at the National Archives. And next one. Yeah, when they did the slave ones, did they do a similar thing with Native Americans families, or only the black families? She asked if, when they did the slave narratives, if they did the same thing with Native Americans. They did not do the same thing with Native Americans.

This is about 65 years after slavery ended. Most of the slaves were dying off, so they decided to catch their story at this time. I wish they would have done the same thing with Native Americans though. But they didn't. Okay, yeah. [INAUDIBLE] Are all the pictures identified? There are many that are. There are some that are not identified, though. If you have pictures of your family though, do a search by the location, and compare and see if maybe pictures that you have of a relative may also be pictured by location, and then identify who it was. Okay. So are the images, all the photos, everything, free of copyright? If it was created by the government, there is no copyright on it. That is automatically public domain--so all those WPA project photographs. Anything else, they will not put up if it's after 1923; 1923 to the present could be under copyright. They're not going to break copyright since they're the office of copyright. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Okay, yes. If you have an instance of Civil War soldiers, tintypes, but some were soldiers and some were just their brothers that didn't have uniforms, do they accept those? Or do they want copies of that?

She was saying, "If you have tintypes of Civil War soldiers or family members, Civil War period, would the Library of Congress collect those?" They have somebody who collects tintypes and has donated a whole collection. So they're not going to just take one. But if you collect these and want to know, "Where do I put these?" the Library of Congress is willing to take a collection. But they're not just going to take one photograph, yeah. Yes. My grandmother wrote this society column in the local paper. And I have not been able to find anything she wrote, but maybe [INAUDIBLE]. Any ideas?

She said--your grandmother, was it?--wrote the society column in their local newspaper. I would see if that newspaper is available online. If not, check some of the other newspaper websites, and see if they have it. If not, contact the state. A lot of times, the state has collected the newspapers and might have microfilm of the newspapers. Back in the 1970s, the Library of Congress had a newspaper project where the state libraries went all over their state, collected the newspapers that they had, and microfilmed those newspapers. So if it's not digitized, they may be on microfilm someplace. The state of Illinois is broke, if nobody knows that. State of Illinois hardly has any that has been digitized. But in the 1970s, they did microfilm all of the newspapers. So if you go to the state library, you can look at the Illinois papers, even though they're not online. Yeah. Is there overlap with the National Archives photos? There is some overlap. The Brady photos are in both.

Question? Oh, the question is, is there an overlap in the photos from the National Archives and the Library of Congress? That's kind of a touchy subject. Until the Depression, when Roosevelt started the National Archives, the Library of Congress was pretty much the national archives for our country. When Roosevelt started the National Archives, that took the responsibility away from the Library of Congress. And so they're sort of rebels against each other. So the more recent ones would be in the-- The more recent ones would be in the National Archives, yeah. Thank you. All right, we still have about four more minutes for questions. Yeah. Are the CCC and the WPA records in line with Congress? The CCC and the WPA records--some of those are in the Library of Congress. Some of those are at the National Archives.

I showed the pictures--most of the CCC material is actually going to be at the National Archives.

Since the National Archives was new at the time, some of them actually stored the information at the Library of Congress when really they probably should have put it in the National Archives. The CCC for the Native Americans of Wisconsin are actually at NARA in the Chicago branch. Okay, Jane Haldeman had mentioned that the Native American CCC project in Wisconsin is in the NARA branch in Chicago. So you may also want checks the branches in the area. And they may actually have the records there for the National Archives. Yeah. Does the Library of Congress also include collections from the U.S. territories?

I'm not sure about that one. I'll have to check in on that. Her question is, does the Library of Congress have material from the U.S. territories? And that's one thing I haven't gone into. But that's something that I'll have to look into. All right, one more question. Yeah. How do you locate the different branches of the Library of Congress? The Library of Congress has one headquarters. They have several buildings. But it's all centered around Washington, D.C. The National Archives has branches all around the United States. But the Library of Congress is housed in Washington, D.C. All right. Thank you. And if [INAUDIBLE],, then come on up. [APPLAUSE]