I searched the Periodical Source Index (available if you're at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center or at home via HeritageQuest through your local library) for each state. In thousands, here are the numbers of genealogy articles returned for each state in order (rounded to the nearest thousand):
1. Ohio 74
2. Illinois 70
3. Texas 59
4. Pennsylvania 57
5. New York 52
6. California 49
7. Kentucky 46
8. Arkansas and Missouri 43
10. Indiana 41
11. North Carolina 37
12. Tennessee 36
13. Virginia 35
14. Michigan 31
15. Georgia 28
16. Kansas 27
17. Massachusetts, Iowa, and Alabama 26
20. Louisiana and Wisconsin 21
22. Maryland and South Carolina 19
24. Washington and Oklahoma 18
26. Minnesota, Oregon, and West Virginia 17
29. New Jersey and Mississippi 15
31. Florida 13
32. Nebraska 11
33. Colorado 9
34. Connecticut and Maine 8
36. Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Vermont 5
40. Idaho, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Rhode Island 4
44. Montana, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming 3
48. Delaware and District of Columbia 2
50. Hawaii and Alaska 1
The Midwest (as defined here) comes in 1, 2, 10, 14, and 20.
Harold Henderson, "Which States Have the Most Genealogy Articles?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]
3 comments:
Very interesting. I wonder what you might reveal by breaking this up by decade.
Good question, Paul. It revealed more than I expected! I tried just one state, Vermont. To search by date I had to switch to Ancestry's interface, which I was surprised to find shows four times as many Vermont articles as HeritageQuest does -- about 20,000! (Yes, that is using exact search.) When I applied exact search to succeeding decades, avoiding overlapping any years, here's how Vermont looked:
1900-1910 = 248 articles
1911-1921 = 456
1922-1932 = 176
1933-1943 = 333
1944-1954 = 1314
1955-1965 = 4090
1966-1976 = 3176
1977-1987 = 1830
1988-1998 = 2503
1999-2009 = 5651
Spot-checking suggests these are genuine hits. It would be interesting to learn if similar patterns occur for other states, but work calls! In any case, it is news to me that PERSI results appear to be extremely sensitive to the search engine employed. Thanks again for the question.
Harold,
I did a check to see why you might have gotten four time more articles. it looks like Ancestry is not limiting the search to PERSI's "State" field. The Ancestry search looks for instances of that place name in *any* field. If you look deeper at the Vermont listings, you will see that many were published in Vermont, but the articles themselves aren't necessarily about Vermont. My assessment is that the Ancestry database isn't going to be good for this task.
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