When researching genealogy, it doesn’t take long to realize that one’s family stretches out to encompass thousands of people in the past. This fact makes it very likely that pieces of your past have already been published. Take my own family as an example; we are not directly descended from anyone famous, yet there are at least a dozen published sources with information about some branch of the family tree.
My sisters and I didn’t know anything about family history research when we started. But we knew the library is always a good place to begin research, so two of my sisters and I traveled to the Maine State Library in Augusta. A quick catalogue search for the name “Mather” led us to a book called “A History of King Philip’s War.” This was an accounting of a series of bloody conflicts between the Pilgrims and New England Native Americans, which took place in 1675. It is not the kind of book we would think of for family history research, and on our own, we never would have checked the index. However, it contained a pedigree chart of several generations of the Mather family, and gave us our first clue to their origins in England.
A similar search in any library may show you many resources you would not seek on your own. In the Thompson Free Library here in Dover, the Maine room has been set aside for history, genealogy and things relating to the state of Maine. There are genealogies of several branches of the Brawn family here, under various last names.
The Maine Room is where you will find the family histories compiled by people who have local relatives. As always, closer to the locality of your ancestors you are liable to find small, often self-published local histories and genealogies which may contain ancestors specific to your family line and not available elsewhere. Every library I have been in has a similar section, and such local information is invaluable.
Once you have exhausted local sources you can access Ursus from most libraries or at home, from your computer. Ursus is the state’s online library cataloguing system which can be used to search for books by subject, title, author, etc.
Ursus will show you books and other media available at the University of Maine System Libraries, the Bangor Public Library, the Maine State Library, The Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library, and the Maine State Archives. Some of these books may be available through interlibrary loan, or you may have to go to that library to see the book.
When I searched on “Brawn family”, Ursus came back with four resources: two small genealogies (Bennett and Young families) at the State Library; a “White Fang” movie which had nothing to do with family history; and the fourth was a student paper about Peter Brawn’s celebrated bear fight on Sebec Lake, available at the University.
Ursus is the gateway to personalizing your Internet research and should always be included in your Maine research. In future columns, I will expand upon ways to use the Internet to bring the rest of the world’s libraries within reach.
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
