South Dakota Library Challenge, Lesson 9

For lesson 9 we were looking at AncestryLibrary, HeritageQuest and Sanborn Maps.
I started with AncestryLibrary, looking up my own name. I tried looking under my maiden name, and found some public records with addresses and phone numbers of places I had lived. Under my married name I found my kids' birth records as well as more addresses and phone numbers where I had lived. Sort of a mini-history of my own life. Also popping up were plenty of relatives, as I did not do an "exact search" (well, I tried, but got no results!) so names similar to mine were coming up. Next I tried a search for my grandmother. I found her in the Social Security Death Index. I was kind of surprised that her social security number was right there. I'm hoping that there are some kind of safeguards in place to prevent use of the numbers of deceased people, since I also found her full obituary with all the other info you would need to steal identities. It had information even I didn't know (who knew her middle name was Leota? Not me!) and names of lots of relatives. This would be very useful for genealogy....it would be a good start for working your way back and back. I even found a census record from 1910 with my great-grandmother in it.
Next I looked in the Photos & Maps section of Ancestry Library. When I typed in South Dakota, all kinds of neat things came up. The Library of Congress had lots of photos, like one of the Corn Palace in 1909 when it was actually a corn palace. There were also family photos, professional baseball players from South Dakota (!), US School Yearbooks, and "General Photographs of the Bureau of Ships". Tons of great photos with lots of historical relevance.
When I tried Heritage Quest, I didn't have nearly as much luck. I searched for "Mayflower Descendants", wanting to see if they had one of the books about Mayflower Descendants in South Dakota, which my grandmother is in. No luck. I searched for Aberdeen, Watertown, and Brown County, all with no results. When I tried Brookings, I did get 6 results. 2 were actual histories of Brookings and the area, and the others were family histories by a Brookings author. I was kind of hoping to see more.
Sanborn Maps was interesting. I chose June 1912 for Aberdeen. We happen to have an original of this actual Sanborn Map in our library, so it was interesting to see what it looked like online compared to the real thing. Pretty similar, actually. I looked up the Ward Hotel, and it was there then as it still is now, but of course almost everything around it had changed. It was interesting to see how different everything is now....the one consistency throughout the town is the railroad.
These are all good resources, and would be especially useful to our upper-level history students, who every year have to choose a topic of local history interest and write a research paper. These sources could all be very helpful for that type of paper. They are also excellent for genealogy research. And if you wanted to find your own address from 1989, you can do that too!