by Lisa Cooke | Aug 17, 2013 | 01 What's New, Book Club, FamilySearch, Research Skills
Do you sometimes wish you had your own enormous library of family history reference books? Or do you dream of how nice it would be to live near a major research library? Or do you ever wish the family history book in your hand had been better indexed so you could turn exactly to the page you need?
Digital books essentially make these dreams come true by putting books at your virtual fingertips with fully-searchable text (no indexes needed!). And FamilySearch’s digitizing project (a partnership with Allen County Public Library and other major research libraries) now has 100,000 titles scanned, more than 80% of which are online.
If you haven’t used the free Family History Books section at FamilySearch.org, you should go browse it right away. According to a press release, “The majority of the books online are family histories, with a smaller portion made up of cemetery records, local and county histories, genealogy magazines, and how-to-books, gazetteers, and medieval histories and pedigrees.”
Your family may be hidden in one of these books – and they’re now searchable with just a few keystrokes. What keywords should you try? Of course, your ancestor’s surnames, including variant spellings. Also search for other words associated with their lives: the name of their hometown, church, school, employer or industry, ethnic group and even surnames of friends or associates.
You can contribute to FamilySearch’s digital books library, too. If you are attending the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference next weekend in Fort Wayne, Indiana, you are invited to bring your own titles for scanning by FamilySearch and Allen County. They are most interested in autobiographies and biographies containing genealogical material; family histories with genealogical information; indexes to records; local and county histories; and yearbooks.
To contribute a digital book, FamilySearch says: “Permission must be obtained from the author or copyright holder before copyrighted books or photos can be scanned. (Most books that were published before 1923 are in the public domain and do not require permission.) There is no limitation on the size of a book for scanning, but photos should not be larger than 8.5 x 11 inches.”
by Lisa Cooke | May 14, 2013 | 01 What's New, Newspaper
Spring is in the air, as it was 100 years ago today. On May 14, 1913 the Omaha Daily Bee, the front page sported a comic depicting the eternal struggle of suburban life – fighting weeds in an effort to achieve the perfect lawn.
(Omaha daily bee., May 14, 1913, Weekly Market Review Edition, Image 1 Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922)
You can view the digitized paper featuring “Mr. Suburbs” at the Chronicling America website, along with digitized papers ranging from 1836 – 1922.
To learn more about using newspapers to climb your family tree grab a copy of my book How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers.
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 8, 2013 | 01 What's New, FamilySearch, Organization, RootsMagic
RootsMagic, the makers of award-winning family history software, now offers free guides for users of PAF (Personal Ancestral File, the free family tree software that is becoming obsolete), FamilySearch Family Tree and their own RootsMagic software.
“RootsMagic for PAF Users: A Quick Start Guide” is a 16-page, full-color booklet that guides PAF users through the transition to RootsMagic. It addresses common questions and is available as a free download here.
In addition, RootsMagic hosts several tutorial videos on its own You Tube channel, RootsMagicTV.com. Dozens of short videos are organized by the most popular and recent videos and by topic: installing and using RootsMagic; using RootsMagic with PAF; and using RootsMagic with FamilySearch’s Family Tree.
If you’re a RootsMagic user (or are thinking about becoming one), check these out.
by Lisa Cooke | Apr 1, 2013 | 01 What's New, NARA
The National Archives announced recently that it will help with the first pilot project of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).
According to the National Archives’ press release, “The DPLA is a large-scale, collaborative project across government, research institutions, museums, libraries and archives to build a digital library platform to make America’s cultural and scientific history free and publicly available anytime, anywhere, online through a single access point.
“The DPLA is working with several large digital content providers – including the National Archives and Harvard University – to share digitized content from their online catalogs for the project’s two-year Digital Hubs Pilot Project. This pilot project is scheduled to launch on April 18-19, 2013 at the Boston Public Library, which will host an array of festivities, including presentations and interactive exhibits showcasing content from the DPLA’s content partners. The DPLA will include 1.2 million digital copies from the National Archives catalog, including our nation’s founding documents, photos from the Documerica Photography Project of the 1970’s, World War II posters, Mathew Brady Civil War photographs, and documents that define our human and civil rights.”
If you’re like me, you’re wondering what genealogically-interesting documents will have a home on the DPLA. There’s a great blog post on the DPLA site that talks about partnerships with state and regional digital libraries, including the Kentucky Digital Library, which has more than 800,000 page
s of newspapers, and over half a million pages of “books, photographs, archival materials, maps, oral histories and pages of other paginated publications.”
NOW we’re talking! The DPLA will certainly be a resource worth watching!
