Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Best "Genealogy Find" This Week (or Month)

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It's Saturday Night again

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing:

1)  What was your best "genealogy find" this week (or this month, or this year)?  Was it a new ancestor, a new record, a new conclusion drawn, a new photograph, or something else?

2)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook.  Be sure to leave a comment with a link to your blog post on this post.

Here's mine:
After speaking with a colleague this week, I learned that the applications for patents (inventions) are located at the National Archives (NARA), Kansas City, and the patent assignments paper work are located at NARA, College Park, Maryland.

Locating the Patents
To prepare for making a request, I attempted to do a patent search online. I found several references to patents for two of my husband’s relatives in documents found on HathiTrust (https://babel.hathitrust.org):

Louis W. Wollenweber, of Jeffersonville, Indiana (across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky), had a patent for a medical compound. His patent number was 132,424, issued 22 Oct 1872.

I found several patents for Thomas N. Davey of Carthage, Missouri:

• No. 54697, ore separator (1866)[1]
• No. 60622, steam trap (1866)[2]
• No. 215,102, hoisting machine (1879)[3]
• No. 222,675, hoisting machine (1879)[4]
• No. 250,716, condenser for metallurgical furnaces[5]

And I found one, no. 45,790, Thomas N. Davey assignor to himself and to Thomas Davey, Sr., machine for cutting chair splints.[6]

Next Step
My next step will be to contact NARA, Kansas City to obtain the patent applications. My colleague had just been told that her images will be arriving soon, and the one of the drawings will be in color!

Here is an image of the hoisting machine:[7]

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[1] 39th Congress, 2d Session, House of Representatives, Ex Doc. No. 109, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the year 1866, volume III, (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1867), p. 373, no. 54697, T. Davey, Ore Separator.

[2] Ibid, p. 1092, no. 60622, T.N. Davey, steam trap.

[3] Speculations and Drawings of Patents issued from the United States Patent Office for May 1879, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879), pp. 132-133, & Drawings, p. 39.

[4] Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1879, (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1879), p. 47, no. 222,675, hoisting machine.

[5] Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1881, (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1882), p. 62, T.N. Davey, no. 250,716, condenser for metallurgical furnaces.

[6] Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year End 1865, Vol. 1, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1867), “Descriptions and Claims of Patents, issued in the year 1865,” p. 17-18, no. 45,790, Thomas N. Davey, machine for cutting chair splints.

[7] Speculations and Drawings of Patents issued from the United States Patent Office for May 1879, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879), pp. 132-133, & Drawings, p. 39.

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