Patents on Google

Google.com has digital images of US patents on their website at http://patents.google.com/. In addition to searching for names, if your ancestor lived in a smaller town, consider searching for the name of that town. Search with the name of the town and all abbreviations for the state. It could be that the state is either spelled out or abbreviated. You might find relatives this way as well--some names are very difficult to read and the OCR of the patents didn't always render names in ways that are easy to locate via search boxes.