Shoutout to the librarian who helped me find birth mother records

I spent 6 whole months trying to track down my birth mother's info through online sites and kept hitting dead ends. Then a librarian at a small county archive in Missouri showed me how to search old newspaper announcements and census records in just one afternoon. Has anyone else found success through local libraries instead of paid services?

2 comments

2 Comments

mia_anderson20d ago

Libraries are okay but I've had way better luck just cold calling old hospitals and churches in the area. The librarians I talked to always wanted to charge me for printouts and copies of everything. Did you end up finding actual contact info or just more clues to chase down?

the_morgan20d ago

Three dead ends in a row with Ancestry and I was about to pay one of those sketchy reunion services $200. My grandmother's small town library in Ohio pulled up a local history newspaper archive that had a birth announcement from 1984. Changed my whole view on libraries honestly. I used to think of them as just book warehouses but they have access to weird niche databases that don't show up on regular internet searches. It's wild what a reference desk can dig up when they know their collection.