I recently learned that the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) website (dar.org) has a free resource of the Digital Magazine Archive spanning from 1892 – 2016. You can find it listed here among their general resources: https://services.dar.org/members/DAR_Research/resources/

I was poking around and doing a search (control-F) for the word “Niagara” to see what I might find in random issues and I came across this query from 1922:¹

Reading this query from O.S.A. made me instantly start to search to see what sources are out there to connect Caleb Mastin Sanborn with his parents. Within a minute, I already had his profile pulled up on the FamilySearch Family Tree: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/KZ9T-TYJ

Caleb’s place of birth was listed as Lockport, NY (close enough to Gasport); he had siblings named Luther, Nelson, Julia, and Marcelia; and his father was shown as having died in 1848, so I felt pretty confident that I had found the correct profile of the person that O.S.A. was searching for back in 1922.

Just poking around and not really researching into it, I can see that Caleb has sources attached for his marriages. Usually marriage records list the bride and grooms parents on them, so Caleb’s parents might have been named. The marriage source that I clicked on didn’t include an original image, but it was transcribed to list Caleb’s parents as Caleb M. Sanborn and H…Lah Hanks. This record could have been one of the avenues that O.S.A. could have used to help find the desired parentage so long ago.

It really made me take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we all are to have resources so easily available and to remember to try to not take them for granted. I’m not that young that I don’t remember using soundex and old microfilm machines! I have seen so many technological changes since I started researching in 2002 that I can’t even begin to imagine what genealogy research will look like in the next 20 years.

I wonder what O.S.A., who made that query almost 100 years ago, would think about the ease in which we find data today and if she ever did find out who Caleb’s parents were way back when. I hope that she did.

Jeanette Sheliga is the Niagara County (NY) Genealogical Society’s (NCGS) Chairman of the Board, Vice President, and Program Chairperson. She is a member of many local and national organizations and holds leadership positions with the Niagara Falls Chapter of the DAR as the Chapter Registrar, the Western New York Genealogical Society (WNYGS) as a member of the Board of Directors, and the Virtual Genealogical Association (VGA) as the Corresponding Secretary. You can learn more about Jeanette on her website and her profile page for the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG).

1. Edith Roberts Ramsburgh, “Genealogical Department: Queries,” Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine LVI, No. 10 (October 1922): 624-9, especially 627; image copy, DAR (https://services.dar.org/members/magazine_archive/download/?file=DARMAG_1922_10.pdf : accessed 4 March 2021).