Somerville, Alabama |
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The location of Somerville | |||
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| Click here for an interactive map for Somerville and the surrounding area. | |||
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Our Genealogical Helper for Somerville ...We have a couple of goals for our Gazetteer:
By learning about Somerville (and the surrounding area) during the time that our ancestors lived, we hope to have a better understanding of both their community and its relationship to their lifes. We hope that this tool helps to give us insight while doing our genealogical research. As we add data and organize our Gazetteer to help with our family research, we will be adding to this, our Genealogical Helper for Somerville. While we don't have information that is specific to any given person or family, we intend to expand our understanding about where and how people lived. It's still very early in our research, but as we gather more information it will be added to this page. |
Newspapers Published in Somerville ...An ongoing effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has resulted in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). To share their results, the partnership has created the Chronicling America website. The goal of this partnership is to assemble a database about the current and historic newspapers of the United States. This includes a growing collection of scanned images from selected papers. All of it available to the public on their website. Using information that we've taken from the Chronicling America website, we've identified 20 newspapers that have been published in the area around Somerville. Although we're unaware of any newspapers that were published in the immediate area of Somerville, there are papers which were published within 16 miles [25.7 km]<1>. A list of those papers, sorted by paper name, can be found on the Extended Newspaper List for Somerville. |
Nearby Communities in 1895 ...We've built the following list with information that came from an Atlas published by Rand McNally in 1895. The Atlas had details such as the population of the community (which appears to have come from the 1890 Census) and whether there was a post office and/or railroad service available. We also indicate if the community no longer exists and is now historic.<3> The Rand McNally Atlas shows that Somerville had a population of 264 people in 1895 with a post office and no railroad service. In 2016, Somerville had a population of 712 people. These communities are listed based on their distance from Somerville, with the one closest to Somerville listed first.
We've also created an expanded list of communities that existed in the 1890's and were located in the area around Somerville. The list can be found on our page for Communities Neighboring Somerville in the 1890's. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Neighboring Counties ...When searching for family records, we have frequently made the mistake of not checking the neighboring counties. For example, we have great-grandparents who lived in the southwest corner of their home county. During their lives, most doctors were in the next county to the west. Almost all of the nearby churches and cemeteries were in the county to the south. So when searching for records, we had our best success by looking in neighboring counties instead of the county in which they lived: their home county contained property and probate records; the county to the west contained birth and death records; the county to the south contained their burial records. If we hadn't included the neighboring counties, we would have missed many valuable sources of information. If you're in a similar situation, we hope that the following information helps. |
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Somerville is located in Morgan County. The following counties adjoin and form the boundaries of Morgan County: Cullman, Lawrence, Limestone, Madison, Marshall & Winston. Below are the counties that are near Somerville. For each of these counties, we show a sample of those communities that are closest to Somerville:
For an expanded list of the communities that are closest to Somerville, see our County-by-County Page for Somerville. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Websites to Help With Your Genealogy Research ...When we do our genealogical research, we first turn to the websites from Cyndi's List, FamilySearch, the UsGenWeb Project or Genealogy Trails. These websites either offer the information directly or else point to where you can find it. Their information is open to all and free to view - you should note that they might link to other websites which do charge. To help you get started, the following links will take you to the pages that are relevant to Somerville: These websites are specific to Alabama:
Website for the Alabama Department of Archives & History Not to be confused with the official state website, we've found the Digital State Archives website for the State of Alabama to be a good source for additional links. These pages are specific to Morgan County:
Genealogy information for nearby counties:
Cemetery Information and Directories for Alabama:
Of Special Interest ... The GenDisasters website specializes in newspaper articles about tragedies and disasters. While it makes interesting reading all by itself, it should be of special interest to genealogists and family historians looking for people who were either affected by or directly involved in such tragedies.
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Miscellaneous References and Mentions for Somerville ...While our initial data for Somerville came from various goverment sources, we have found mention of Somerville in old books and maps. When we do, we'll find a fact here or a snippet there. We've created the following list to keep track of the documents we found useful in adding to our knowledge about Somerville. We hope that the following list of documents will be of interest to you.
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Other Roadside Stops ... |
Off-the-Road Links ...Unfortunately, we don't know of a website for Somerville. If you can help, please contact us through our Feedback Page. The official website for Morgan County: www.co.morgan.al.us/ The official website for State of Alabama: www.alabama.gov/ |
Footnotes ...
For additional information, please visit our Glossary for Somerville. |