Monday, May 31, 2010

Find Your Family History on . . . eBay?

Family history information truly can be discovered just about anywhere. Have you considered looking on the internet auction site eBay? It's definitely worth a try. Remember the old adage - one man's junk is another man's treasure.

Today, just typing in the word genealogy on eBay resulted in more than 24,000 items for sale! Of course, you need to narrow down your search if it's going to be fruitful. For example, use the place names of where your ancestor lived. For example, a search on Limerick, Ireland gave me 180 items to review. There are old postcards, a book on the families of Limerick and vintage photographs.

You can even try searching on your ancestor's name. eBay sellers have a lot of vintage portraits for sale. Here's one I came across in a search on Waterloo, Iowa: a studio portrait of a man named William Brennan. What a find if you happen to be researching him!

Other potential resources you might find on eBay are high school yearbooks, community cookbooks (did your ancestor contribute a recipe?), plat maps, family histories, histories of locations - any kind of memorabilia and documents you can imagine are likely to be found on eBay.

If you don't want to search eBay every day, once you have a search that meets your criteria, you can click on the link that reads save this search and alert me later. eBay will sent you email alerts as new items are posted meeting that criteria.

Give it a try - you never know what you might find!

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