Are you setting out on your journey to find your canal family tree? We are often asked how to find people who worked or lived on the canals, and sadly, there is no magic place where all canal based records are kept. A lot depends on how your state ran the canal. Was the canal government controlled, or was it all hired out? New York State has run its canals since 1817 and has great canal records when it comes to the construction and operation, but employees not so much. States like Pennsylvania and Ohio built their canals but hired out their operations to private firms. The Delaware and Hudson Canal was all privately owned and operated. If your ancestor was a state employee they might be mentioned in passing. If they were a boat owner or worked for someone on a boat, it is unlikely you will find them mentioned in any official records. If they were born on a boat, you might find a birth notice in the local town or county, but not often. So what to do? Well don’t despair. If you live down the street or on the other side of the world, there are many resources to help you find your ancestors and here are some of our favorite places to look.
First off, although subscription services such as Ancestry.com or Family Search can seem expensive, the amount of materials available will be well worth any money spent. These services have millions of records available and if you add up what you can find on their sites, and what it would cost to drive to each site to hunt and peck, you will find it worth the cost. Plus if you do a DNA test, it will tie into your tree. If you are new to these services, check out some of the genealogical how-to videos on You Tube. If you can’t afford them, or just wish to see what they offer, many libraries have access to a free Ancestry.com account, so ask!
But maybe you don’t want to do that, so try these sites.
Check with the state’s canal society. Most are all volunteer run groups but many maintain an archives or at the very least, know where the records are kept. The Canal Society of New York State, the Canal Society of Ohio, the Canal Society of New Jersey, the Canal Society of Indiana, the Virginia Canals and Navigations Society, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Society, the Pennsylvania Canal Society, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Association, as well as many smaller groups.
A Caution- All these sites use OCR (optical character recognition) technology. if you don’t find what you are looking for, try a different search term or way to word it. You will be surprised!
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. Local historical societies will write up articles, newspapers will run history based articles, and of course those of us who write blogs, are constantly adding new information to the web. The search engines will typically pick it up.
There are rules that will help your searching, such as adding “quotes” around your search terms. I go into this a bit further down in this post, but in short, searching for Bob Smith and then “Bob Smith” will return different results. The quotes turn the two words into one phrase. However if Bob Smith used the middle name Tom, using the quotes will rule out any returns if he was called Bob Tom Smith, or Bob T. Smith.
Google Books. Make a direct search in the Google Books search engine. Sometimes Google Books will pop up in your broad internet search, but not always. This is a overlooked resource. Search for; Bob Smith Lock 34 canal, and see what comes up. Be fancy and add the quotes to search “Bob Smith” “Lock 34” canal.
See if there is a local historical society. Many towns and villages will have a small volunteer run historical society, but every state is different. For instance, New York has village, town and county governments, whereas Pennsylvania has townships and county. Some states have county and city governments only. If you can’t find a local resource then take a wider look. Is there a county or city historical society? Check for a state archives or state library. Then check with the Library of Congress! Use a website like Cyndi’s List and/or Linkpendium to help you find these resources.
Be warned. While many small organizations will be happy (delighted!) to answer your questions, many will charge a fee upfront just take a look. If the organization has paid staff, then expect to pay for any information.
Check digital newspapers. Newspapers.com is a paid service but might be worth a month’s service if you can find something. The site called Old Fulton Postcards is free. It has over 51 million newspaper pages (as of March 2022) from all across the United States and Canada. 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 sites search engine, and specifically, how to do Boolean searches. If you were searching for Oliver Tanner who ran a dry dock in Port Byron NY, you could simply type in the word Tanner, and chose the All The Words search 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/phrase. 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 far away newspaper that notes that “Mrs. Tanner of Port Byron, NY was visiting her niece last week.”
While Old Fulton is great, it is not easy to turn the page if your article is continued on …(page 4). What you need to do is 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.
There are many other newspaper resources. The Advantage Archives are working with smaller organizations with digitizing their collections and then hosting the pages. Check their website for a directory map to see what might be available near your relatives. Advantage Archives has a nice feature where you can simply turn the page to find that continued on article. Many times if I know the date I am looking for I will focus on that date and then search the entire paper for the name, just in case the OCR missed it. 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.
Be sure to check out the US GenWeb project. GenWeb is not what it used to be but it can be helpful and should be checked. Some county pages are great while others are very basic.
Don’t overlook Find A Grave, and Billion Graves. Both of these sites post cemetery information and have local volunteers that will search for a headstone and photograph it for you. Many of the bios are quite full of information.
Finding Their Routes; Family History and Genealogy -(Pamela Vittorio) specifically focuses on canal based family research. This is a fee based service but might be worth it if you are really stuck. Here is a guide Pamela has for finding records in New York State. if you want to hear Pamela talk about the canal and records, here she is on The Forget-Me-Not-Hour in 2016. (audio) The first 30 minutes is mostly a canal overview and history. The second half gets into what records are available.
Feel free to drop us a note and we will be happy to try to guide you along.