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The blogger would like to share two resources with you that were used to help someone who sent an email request for assistance to QHGS this past week—a request which concerned dates for a death and a marriage that had occurred in North Dakota between 1900 and 1913.

map image: Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin

Now, if you’ve tried to research your relatives in that state, you know North Dakota resources are not easy to find. We tackled the problem in this order:

1.) FamilySearch.org, usually our first stop on the research trail, had no North Dakota marriage or death records online at all, and only 2,000 births had been indexed so far. It did offer the 1915 and 1925 state censuses; but, those dates were too late to solve any problems raised in the email. 

2.) A quick look at Ancestry.com, usually our second stop on the research trail, revealed a similar situation: no North Dakota birth, marriage, death, or newspaper databases were online. There was an 1885 state census available; but, that date was too early to solve any problems raised in the email.

3.) So, where did we go online to find the information? To the North Dakota GenWeb Project at http://www.ndgenweb.org/. This FREE site provides genealogy researchers with links to all things North Dakota: museums, libraries, genealogy clubs and historical societies, history books, oral history projects, school censuses, cemetery books and transcriptions, and the ND GenWeb Archives which contain hundreds of transcriptions made by volunteers. 

4.) Once we linked up to the North Dakota GenWeb Archives, at http://usgwarchives.net/nd/ndfiles.htm, we selected the county we wanted and discovered an index to the Highland Home Cemetery published by the James River Genealogy Club that held an answer to part of the request for help. This index had been transcribed and put online by volunteers in 2007. An old death register that had been transcribed in 2001 gave even more information: the middle name of the decedent, both of the parents’ names and their birthplaces, the mother’s maiden name, and the decedent’s date of death. There were also transcriptions of old marriage records, put online in 2004, and one of them answered the second part of that request for help.

RESEARCH TIP: Use the U. S. GenWeb!!!! And if you have a really difficult problem that you cannot solve, email us and ask for suggestions or help at questingheirs@gmail.com.