Back in the days of card catalogs, the Scott County Iowa Genealogical Society created a name index to a wide variety of items available in the Special Collections Center.
Dubbed the Scott County Unusual Sources Index (SCUSI for short), it provides names pulled from a range of resources, from census schedules to Atlases, history books to sexton records, newsletters to church records—most of them off the usual research path and none of them particularly easy to search.
This index has proved invaluable to staff and patrons over the years. And now, due to the diligent efforts of volunteer Ellen Korn—who typed up drawers full of index cards—our researchers may now search SCUSI through our Center’s Free Local Database search engine!
Just type in a name and hit the “Search The Database” button”:
If you aren’t sure about middle initials or spellings, try the “Starts With” or “Contains” options to direct or broaden your search.
A list will appear of the number of times that name appears in each of our index databases (SCUSI is at the bottom):
SCUSI has 324 listings for “Smith”. Does that seem a little low to you?
Click the number link to pull up the results for a specific database:
The first seven listings of 324 . . .
As you can see, the date,* source, and notes provide good information all by themselves, and the source location will assist you (or assist our staff in assisting you) in finding the source in which the surname appears.
All this, and you can search it from home, too! Why not give it a try—and discover the kinds of Unusual Sources your ancestors got themselves into?
Thanks, Ellen!
We really appreciate your hard work!
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*Psst: If you ever see the current date in the third field (see the fourth listing?), don’t worry—that only means that there was no date available, so our system “helped” by filling in the blank. We’re currently trying to convince it to stop and we apologize for any confusion!
