Internet Archive Revisited

Trinity College, Dublin Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

​If you’re like me, you learn about interesting sites, use them and then like kids we run off to the next new shiny thing. I thought that this week we would revisit the Internet Archive site. This non-profit site “is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Let’s see what fun things we can find at the Internet Archive.

If you’d like to revisit my original post, you can find it here: Internet Archive - Herding Cats Genealogy. I decided to search for North Dakota and that brought up thousands of hits, so I narrowed it down to Richland County, North Dakota and here are a few interesting finds. Will you find information specific to your family? Perhaps not but you will find community and historical information that is available online for you to use. Unless you were looking in a regional library that had historical pamphlets of a region, these items would not be accessible. We are lucky to have so many resources available to us with a click of button.
 
Below are the links so you can see the results for “North Dakota” and “Richland County North Dakota”
 
Internet Archive Search: North Dakota
 
North Dakota Farmer V. 15 No. 3 Sept. 1913: Coleman Museum, Ellendale North Dakota: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive
 
 
Internet Archive Search: Richland County, North Dakota
 
If you haven’t taken advantage of the Hankinson, ND newspaper extracts and have family in the Richland County area—especially Fairmount, Hankinson, Tyler, and Wahpeton—it is worth your while to search to see if you find any marriage and deaths in the Hankinson News: marriages and deaths by Elizabeth M. Collins. These type extracts are indexed and grouped by years. If you find a death notice of a relative, you can then look for microfilm of these newspapers to find the original article. Plus, these volumes are available for download.
 
The 1900 and 1910 census records are available for viewing for North Dakota from this site. You will need to look through to find the particular film that has your county as the titles to not identify the counties.
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There are books available that you can borrow for free with a free account. This is an excellent book that you may find interesting:  Land in her own name: women as homesteaders in North Dakota by Elaine H. Lindgren.
 
Have fun looking at the possibilities available on the Internet Archive site. You never know what treasure you’ll uncover. Happy searching!