I’m going to do a series of posts on sites I’ve found useful in doing my genealogy research.  This first one will be on the USGen Web Project.  The main portal can be found at http://www.usgenweb.org/states/index.shtml  From there you click on a map of the states followed by a list or map of counties at the state site.  What you get to from these clicks varies widely.  Some county sites have a great variety of valuable information, while some others are a bit lacking.  But you’ll not know until you dig in and see.  I suspect there are some web sites available which rate given USGen sites, but I haven’t gone looking for them yet.  I’d like any experienced genealogists to give us some examples of good and not-so-good county sites that they know of.  I’ll start a collection of them according to what feedback I get and if there’s a more comprehensive listing somewhere, I’ll add a link or links to this post.

Since I’ve only been to a couple of dozen USGenWeb sites myself, I’m hoping to get a lot of tips eventually, and I’ll try updating this post as seems warrented.

To get things started I’m going to check with the the two counties I’m most interested in; Licking County, Ohio (where my mother’s ancestors lived for about 130 years from 1803-1930+ and Washington County, Pennsylvania, where these Licking County ancestors lived for a few decades in the late 1700s to the early 1800s.

LICKING COUNTY, OHIO

Well, a pleasant surprise looking at the first page.  Robert Sizelove, Sr. is now the coordinator there.  I have communated with him in e-mail and he’s done a lot of work photographing and reading gravestones in Licking County… Well, looking things over, I got thinking about a bunch of photos which I’d taken at Green Hill Cemetery in Licking County Ohio but had never renamed to indicate whose graves they were…  Then I found I needed to figure out how to print out a list of the gravestone files, but more recent versions of Windows don’t make it easy, so I had to relearn how to do things in a DOS window, but I finally got it done and now I’m busy renaming files and attaching copies to the people in my Mother’s family tree who are among those whose stones I shot.  So I guess the take-away is that you never know where things will lead you when you go to a USGen Web Project site.  Next post I’ll do the same for the Washington County, Pennsylvania site, but no promises what I’ll find to write about there.