COGenBlog

Lee Zion, COGenWeb Colorado Places By County Webmaster, has announced that the project pages have moved to a new URL. Colorado Places By County is a directory of Colorado place names. The directory provides the county in which the place exists or existed, years the place existed, and other related remarks. The authors have attempted to include every settlement, trading post, military post, mining camp, ghost town, stage station, railroad stop, post office, rural community, town and city from the earliest known into the present.

The following example is a typical entry:

The new address is — www.rootsweb.com/~coplaces/

Julie Miller’s monthly column is in the 8 July 2006 edition of the Broomfield Enterprise. The topic for July is Effective Use of Libraries (and other repositories). The article provides five practical tips on the use of repositories. It also lists several Colorado repositories that can be useful for genealogy research.

The Gold Bug, developers of the popular AniMap software, have made their SiteFinder database available online in a “mashup”* with the Google Maps service. This can be useful to genealogists for quickly visualizing locations of geographical or manmade features. For instance, you can search for a place by name (the following will show four locations):

Place name contains the word(s): Niwot
State: Colorado

Or search for places by type — the following finds the locations of twelve cemeteries:

County: Boulder
Type: Cemetery
State: Colorado

Here is a piece of the map generated by the above Boulder County cemetery query:

Thanks to Genealogy Websites I Don’t Hate for this tip.

* Originally a term for mixing tracks from different musical recordings, a mashup can also be a “website or web application that combines content from more than one source.” — Wikipedia

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Denver Public Library (DPL) has a number of databases which offer valuable genealogical information. For a handy way of searching all of them at once, try this Google search technique. Type the following into the Google search box:

   SURNAME site:denverlibrary.org inurl:gene|genealogy

Here’s an explanation of the various parts of the above search:

• SURNAME
  Here you’ll substitute your own surname, or you can use any other word.
• site:denverlibrary.org
  This restricts your search to files found on the DPL site.
• inurl:gene|genealogy
  This restricts your search to files found in the “gene” or “genealogy” folders on DPL’s Web site (which will cover just about all of the genealogical databases).