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October 30, 2005

Genealogy and Family History Research

DistantCousin.com

According to the Welcome message at this website, "DistantCousin is an online archive of genealogy records and scanned images of historical documents from a wide variety of sources, such as newspaper obituaries, city directories, census records, ship records, ship lists, school yearbooks, military records and more. In all there are 6 million genealogy records from over 1,500 sources online. There are no fees or memberships required to use the records at DistantCousin."

When I visited the site for the first time I found several "Featured Genealogy Databases," including the San Francisco, CA 1922 City Directory, El Paso, TX 1927 City Directory, among others.

It appears that some links go to Ancestry.com ($), and Genealogy.com ($).

Under "United States Genealogy" I clicked on California and found scanned images of a city directory for Menlo Park, CA dated 1926.

Using that link I found clickable page numbers and surnames. Users will have to use the "Find" function in their browser to locate a particular name; the names are "not necessarily in alphabetical order."

On the same page with the link to the city directory, are links to a number of CA university yearbooks. Those - or at least the one or two that I checked - are not scanned, but are extracted lists.

Perhaps the most useful area that I found on this website are the scanned images of city directories. I searched the 1924 Nashville, TN directory and found a couple of Coffee names, and several Coffeys. These are a few:

COFFEE Joe M. (Hallie) mach h2605 Branch av
COFFEE Smith* lab Ward Belmont Sch h1007b 10th av S
COFFEY Benj B pres Reliance Mfg Co h321 21st av N
COFFEY Ella* h620 Webster
COFFEY Emma Mrs R25 Carroll

All in all, this site looks very interesting, and one that needs more exploring. Click on the title link to visit them.

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