AncestryLibrary/HeritageQuest/ Sanborn

All three of these databases serve to paint a picture of our past.
With Ancestry Library many documents can be found to fill out a family tree and also data about people living today. It is awesome that these records can be found to help with geneology, but also a little scary to think that I can access so much data from a computer in the library.
In searching for myself I was able to come up with addresses both current and past--the address I lived in when I was in high school.
With further searching I found information about my maternal grandfather--from a census report I found out he lived in New York when he was 3 years old, with a father, mother, brother and his maternal grandfather. His mother and grandfather immigrated to America in 1884 from England. Their neighbors were from Spain, Ireland and England. All of this info was gleaned from one census report. From there I was able to search for my great-grandmother (his mother) and found that after they moved to North Carolina she died of Typhoid fever at the age of 33. It has been fascinating following these trails of information, all so readily available.
One document I found that was particularly interesting was a census of my father whose mother died when he was an infant. He and his father and 10 siblings went to live with his cousin who had two children. All of this information was in a census report, listing all of the people living in the house. What was interesting was that his name was spelled wrong, possibly the census taker heard something different. I imagine that happened a lot in census and immigration records over the years making some research very tricky.
HeritageQuestprovided some of the same information as Ancestry library but also historical documents about places. I looked up Sioux Falls and found several histories of the area which would be quite beneficial to a researcher or someone curious about the area.
Sandborn Mapsprovides the last piece to a puzzle of our past. With this resource, maps can be found to see how a town looked in the past and how it developed over the years.
All of these resources provide a picture of the people and places of our past.