Recently, I’ve been hearing and reading that it’s possible to find family-related items on eBay just by searching either on a surname or location. So I thought I’d give it a try. I didn’t have much luck searching on surnames but I did have some luck searching on place names.

The first item I located was a postcard of Hudiksvall, Sweden – where my Swedish great grandparents Andrew and Brita Dalin lived before they came to the U.S., and where Andrew was most likely born.

I asked my husband, who has some knowledge of vehicles, if he could date the postcard based on the car coming down the road. He thought the earliest date could be about 1935. Although my great grandfather was born much earlier in 1859, it was still fun to find this image of a street scene – possibly a street my ancestors may have walked down.

I also found a great magazine article about the mining town in Montana where my great grandfather David Lyman Blacker and his partner John Keating had their first mining success in 1866 – and where my great grandparents David and Ada lived until they moved to Helena in late 1882, early 1883.

The real bonus came when I actually located several references to my great grandfather and his partner Keating in the article, although my great grandfather’s name is misspelled as “Blackner” – which explains why the surname search was unsuccessful.

And here I’d like to give a special “thank you” to Tom Russell who dedicated his retirement to searching for and acquiring items related to “Old Western History and Memorabilia”. Then he spent hours indexing articles like this one and posting them on eBay for some lucky family historian like me to discover. Sadly, Tom passed away in 2014 but his daughter Debbie continues to post and sell his items on eBay. Thanks, Tom and Debbie!

Everybody should try searching eBay. You never know what you might find!