With tomorrow being Independence Day in the United States, it seems only fitting to highlight a resource available online in digitized format to the general public on the website of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution.
First, click on the LIBRARY link just above the home page photo. When the drop down menu opens, click on RESOURCES.
Next, click on the second choice in blue on the left side of the page – DAR Magazine Archive.
I couldn’t capture the whole list of years by decades in the screen shot, but the list goes down to the 1890s when the DAR Magazine first began publication.
The magazines can be searched, at least up until 1998. I have found that single words work best in the search box. For example, I entered “Isabelle Hubbard,” who was the first State Regent of California. No hits were returned, but when I entered only “Hubbard,” a long list appeared with all the Hubbards mentioned in various issues of the magazine.
While the DAR Magazine included many reports of DAR business, it also contained many historical articles relating to the early history of the United States, family Bible records and military records. Thousands of genealogical queries have been published through the years.
What I like about this list of results is that each entry is identified as SUBJECT, as in subject of the article or person who gave a report, ILLUSTRATION, which is often a photograph of the person or GENEALOGICAL QUERY, which speaks for itself.
Remember, DAR has been in the ancestry business for almost 126 years. A while back, I wrote about my husband’s David Lewis-Ann Beeson family from North Carolina. Many people had exact dates of birth for these children born at a time and in a place where vital records were not yet kept by the government. I figured there had to be a Bible record around somewhere and one of my readers tipped me off to where I could find it – in a 1936 issue of the DAR Magazine!
It is definitely worth taking the time to search or browse if you are looking for colonial or early American ancestors.
Happy 141st Birthday to the United States of America!
Thank you for this Linda! My sister researches one tiny little sliver of our tree that includes a line going back to pre-Revolutionary War time in the colonies. She has kind of petered out. Most of my research time is spent out of the US. I took a look and found a bunch of things in the DAR magazines that will either get her going again, or that I will use and work on this part of our tree. So exciting! Thank you for sharing.
You’re welcome. DAR is a terrific resource and many either don’t realize there is so much coming online or else they think one has to be a DAR member to access it.