Are you setting out on your journey to find your family tree? If you live down the street or on the other side of the world, there are many resources to help you find your ancestors. Here are some of our favorite places to look. And these apply to everyone, but they will focus on local research.

Internet Search engines, or just “Google it.” Don’t overlook the simple tool of simply typing in your name and seeing what comes up. The search engines that power the internet are constantly crawling about content and updating. Hopefully the resources on the Lock 52 Historical Society will come up first, but you might find posts on our old Blogger site, old columns from the Auburn Citizen, Dawn Roe’s excellent Port Byron History Corner, and so much more

Google Books. Make a direct search in the Google Books search engine. Sometimes Google Books will pop up in your broader internet Google search, but not always. This is a overlooked resource. There are a lot of family histories out there, all written in the end of the 1800s and early 1900s. These can be quite helpful, but unless they come with citations, they are basically hearsay. But use them for great hints.

The Hafti Trust is another great digital book resource. In both of these, be creative in how you search. If you are looking for Phillip King in Port Byron, use quotes to make the system search for the phrase instead of the words. So “Phillip King” and Phillip King are two very different search terms. Use “Phillip King” AND “Port Byron.” The AND OR NOR commands are helpful but not always needed. But what about “Phillip King” AND Mentz, or “Phillip King” AND “Cayuga County,” or just King and Cayuga. Try all sorts of variations.

Old Mentz Digital Collection. This page on our website lists the many items we have made available over the years. We have links to our Advantage Archives search portal where we have newspapers, school newspapers, and the InPort Community newspaper. You will also find links to our collection of home movies on You Tube, the old Blogger pages, and other items we have scanned and made available in-house.

Seymour Library. The Seymour Library on Auburn, NY also uses an Advantage Archives search portal that allows you to search the Auburn, NY newspapers. We have also shared some of the Port Byron newspapers with them.

Old Fulton Postcards. This free site has over 49 million newspaper pages (as of Jan 2021) from all across the United States and Canada. If you are searching for your Port Byron family that moved to Michigan, you will likely find them here. As you might expect, it is a very busy site and at times, you will find the results very slow to load. I will open a few tabs and have many searches going at once so I am not waiting for a page to open.

If you use Old Fulton, take some time to learn how to use the search engine, and specifically, how to do Boolean searches. For instance, if you just type in the name Tanner, and chose the All The Words option, your results will show every time the name Tanner, or the word tanner, as in tanning leather, was used. You could try to focus a bit more by entering, Tanner Port Byron, and then chose All The Words, and you will find every time Tanner, tanner, Port, and Byron, was used. So your results might show articles about the poems of Lord Byron next to a leather maker in Port Jacobs. You could try the Exact Phrase option to find all the articles about Port Byron, but that will return all the mentions of such as the Port Byron Chronicle, Port Byron schools, Port Byron Illinois, and so on.

Instead, use the Boolean search function and use the w/? function. Boolean allows you to enter the words, Tanner AND Port AND Byron, however it is much easier to enter Tanner w/10 “Port Byron.” This change has done a couple things. First notice that Port Byron is in quotes. This turns the two words into one word. So instead of getting every time Port and Byron is used, you will find only Port Byron. The w/10 tells the search engine to search for each time the word Tanner is used within 10 words of “Port Byron” And the number is up to you. If you wish to find all the times Oliver is used near Tanner, such as any of Oliver Tanner that might include his middle name, enter Oliver w/5 Tanner. You could do Tanner AND “Port Byron”, and you will find each time Tanner was on the same page as “Port Byron.” This is very helpful for finding those little articles in a Michigan newspaper that notes that “Mrs. Tanner of Port Byron, NY was visiting her niece last week.”

You will find many of, but not all, the Port Byron and Auburn newspapers on the Old Fulton site, so you might wonder why bother with the Lock 52 and Seymour sites? There are a couple reasons. The first is speed. You will find your returns are much faster as our sites has no where near the internet traffic that Old Fulton sees. You can also flip through the pages of the newspapers just by clicking on the arrows on the left and right of the page. This is very helpful when you find that article that says, “continued on page.” You just turn the page to resume reading. On Old Fulton you will need to copy the page address that you are currently on, take a guess at how many pages to add, paste that into the search box, enter the Exact Phrase option, and then adjust from there. So if you find an article on page 8 of the Port Byron Chronicle 1905 Oct-0788.pdf, and your article continues on page 12, you will need to adjust the address to -0792.pdf. And go from there.

You cannot use the Boolean search method on the Lock 52 or Seymour portals, Instead you are limited to All Of The Words, Exact Phrase, and other defining terms. However, as the total pool of resources are confined to just the Port Byron papers, or just the Auburn papers, it is not that limiting a factor.

Advantage Archives. This company has worked with many small organizations to digitize and make collections available. Check their website for a directory map to see what might be available near your relatives. Note- I find that the Community History Archive Directory works better for me in Firefox then Chrome.

NYS Historic Newspapers. This is another organization that has made newspapers available on the internet. Their search engine is a little different but you can search by county, dates, names and so on.

There is also Newspapers.com. This is a subscriber service, but you can join by the month. I don’t find it as easy to search as Old Fulton, but others disagree with that. It is great to be able to search in far away places from your desktop, and think of the gas, hotel stay, food and such that you save by being able to search so easily.

The big fish in the genealogical ocean is Ancestry.com, and if you are serious about doing the work, it is worth the price. When you start your tree, hints will pop up to help guide you to possible records. We use Ancestry for our Port Byron Family Tree project, so if you are searching, make certain to look for that tree in your hints.

Family Search is another genealogical resource. You will need to create an account, but the tree and resources are free. Be sure to check out the Research WIKI page to help you find resources from across the globe, and find out if what you are seeking is available as digital files. Then check out the new (as of 2024) AI search tool that can read all the documents that have not been indexed. This opens up a brand new world of research. 

Cayuga County NYGenWeb. It use to be part of the old Rootsweb family, but when that ended, a new collaboration was born. Our local GenWeb volunteers have created one of the best free genealogical websites on the internet.

Montezuma Family Project. Kathy Decker has put together a fantastic site that has  a list of Montezuma (and Mentz) surnames along with comprehensive family data. As the town of Montezuma was once a part of the town of Mentz, it is a good idea to check to see if your family is on this list. Kathy has also been working on a project to merge our Ancestry tree with her database. This is not available online, but please be sure to ask. 

Port Byron Library. The library has a local history room that has books, yearbooks, directories, some files, and other local materials. You will need to visit, however, and they have regular hours.

Find A Grave, and Billion Graves. Both of these post cemetery information and have local volunteers that will search for a headstone and photograph it for you.

There are hundreds of similar sites that will help you explore your family tree. There are sites like Cyndi’s List and Linkpendium that simply gather links and help direct you to those resources.

And of course, we are always here to help!