I have already mentioned searching the OurFutureOurPast website for local history books that could contain stories about your ancestors. There is another great website that lets you do similar searches for family history projects: Peel’s Prairie Provinces. This is the place to go for on-line Henderson’s Directories, as discussed in a previous tip, however, this site offers so much more.

By selecting the ‘Find Books’ tab and then entering your search term (an ancestor’s name, for example) you can locate resources you may not have access to elsewhere. Although this site is from the University of Alberta, they do have materials from other parts of the prairies. For example, I was able to find a photograph of my great-grandfather in the publication put out by the Saskatoon Industrial Exhibition of 1925! He happened to be a Director in Charge of one of the competitions, something else I didn’t know before doing this search. You can also search place names to understand where your relatives lived or travelled. I found super resources (maps and travel/tourism brochures) that my ancestors probably used when they travelled across the prairies in 1926 on their way through the mountains on newly opened highways. Tips to narrow the results of your search include putting names in quotation marks and/or selecting a date or subject range (shown on the righthand side of the screen).

Peel’s Prairie Provinces does focus on a limited geographical area, but for those with ancestors in this region, it is a fabulous resource that has few parallels in other regions.

This article was originally printed in the Bergen News and is being reprinted with permission.