by Susan Ives, Alamo PC

Laura told nudged me over to the Official Federal Land Patent Records Site run by the Department of the Interior. It provides access to more than two million Federal land title records for Eastern Public Land States, issued between 1820 and 1908. Land patents document the transfer of land ownership from the federal government to individuals. 

The database does not include the original thirteen colonies, which eliminates anyone in my family (I'm the only one to have willingly crossed either the Mississippi River or the Mason-Dixon Line) but it has been a treasure trove for John. An Ancestor, Thomas B. Ives, bought and sold 30 parcels of federal land in Mississippi. John has looked up the details of the sale (location, acreage, etc.); got free digitized photos of the land patents, and could order certified copies if he wanted them.

The interface is user-friendly. If you have relatives who passed through Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, or Wyoming, this is a must-see site.

My brother is the historian in our family. Periodically he searches for our surname, Konschak, using the regular search engines such as Altavista, HotBot and my new favorite, Google. If your last name is unusual, as ours is, just the surname may limit your search enough to be useful. If it’s a common name, you might want to add a first name, state, country of origin or even a date. If the search engine gives you the option, limit the search to “all the words” and group names together by placing them in quotation marks, as in “Susan Ives”.

One site he found was written in Spanish, about a Croatian Jesuit priest, Fernando Konschak. Croatian? That’s a new twist! The site claimed: el jesuita croata Fernando Konschak, gran misionero, explorador y colonizador, hizo el primer mapa científico de la Baja California, probando su carácter peninsular. It went on like this for screen after screen. Fortunately, the Web now has built-in translations for many languages. With a mouse click he was able to read: jesuita Fernando Konschak, great missionary, explorer and colonizador, did the first map scientific of the Baja California, proving his peninsular character. The grammar’s not great but the meaning is clear. With this new clue, he searched for Croatian Jesuit explorers – rather than German Lutheran farmers – and learned that the Spanish often spelled Konschak as Consag or Gonsago. Another site spelled it Konšcak, with a little accent above the S. 

If you want to try this for yourself, go to www.altavista.com. In the search box, type “Fernando Konschak”. Include the quotation marks. The first result should be “Studia Croatica: La Tragedia de Bleiburg.” Instead of clicking on the link, click on the translate button. To find out more about AltaVista’s translation capabilities, go to babel.altavista.com.

It doesn’t stop there. Armed with this data, he found that there is a biography of our new great-great-great-whatever, “The Apostolic Life of Fernando Consag, explorer of Lower California.” Published in 1968, it is out of print – and there were only 500 copies produced to begin with. First stop, the San Antonio Public Library. Click on the Catalog and Database bar and you can search the card catalog. This is a relatively new innovation — before, you had to install a telnet client and work in an awkward, mouse-disabled, text-only DOS-like mode. This is easier. They didn’t have the book, but I didn’t have to drive to the library to find that out. 

We found the book at www.alibris.com. Alibris has been advertising heavily in The New Yorker as one-stop shopping for out of print books. It worked for me. A copy in “Near Fine” condition was available from a bookstore in Los Angeles for $59.95. My brother will get it for Christmas. (Don’t tell…it’s a surprise!)

You probably don’t care a fig about the Konschak family tree. But look at what my brother did, never leaving his desk:

• He unearthed a possible ancestor
• He discovered at least three alternate spellings of his last name
• He found (and I bought) a biography of the newly-found ancestor
• He translated critical genealogy documents from Spanish to English
• He checked several library card catalogs, saving a wasted trip

Check with your Internet Service Provider to see if you have free space (you probably do) or use some of the free space at a site such as GeoCities. My San Antonio, a collaboration between the Express-News and KENS will also host a community (hover your mouse over the community navbar and select “community groups”.) A wizard walks you through the process of setting up your site — no technical knowledge is required. 

Also, be sure to check the MySanAntonio genealogy area. It has well-chosen links, news of local genealogy groups and reprints of genealogy-related articles from the paper. Go to it directly at www.mysa.com/mysanantonio/genealogy/ or click on the Lifestyle link from the MySanAntonio main page and munge around until you find the link.

To view some other examples of modest genealogy sites that have paid big dividends for their researchers, check out www.rootsweb.com/~txbexar/personalweb11.htm.