The following teaser is from an excellent article written by Hannah Hoffman for the Statesman Journal, and posted August 5, 2014 on their website.
A database of Oregon residents before it became a state has been picked up by Ancestry.com, the primary genealogy website in the country, giving people across the country searchable access to thousands of records predating 1860.
The “Early Oregonians Database Index” was added to the national genealogy website in July. It contains more than 100,000 entries and includes both settlers and Native Americans who already lived in the Oregon Territory.
Ancestry paid the state $1,500 for access to the database, said Layne Sawyer, manager of reference services. The company will make the database available to subscribers, but it is free on the Oregon Archives website for anyone who would like to use it.
The project began about a decade ago, Sawyer said, in preparation for Oregon’s 150th anniversary of statehood in 2009.
