Firstly, an apology for not posting last Friday. My intention was to do an Easter-themed blog, but instead we were dealing with a family emergency. Sometimes even the most tragically obsessed family historian needs to prioritise the here and now over those that are long departed. Normal service is now resumed…
FamilySearch
Most people who are constructing their family tree are aware of FamilySearch.org. As a totally free genealogy resource, it is invaluable and becoming more so every day. Those of you who have downloaded my free guide to my Top 10 favourite genealogy sites know I love this one! Many of the records on the site are indexes, and you really need to find and cite the original documents to verify the information. But even these are a great finding aid to help you on your way. In recent years, the team at FamilySearch have been adding many original documents to the site (just look for the camera icon to see the images).
It is common for people to focus on the top two items in the drop down menu under ‘Search’. That is, ‘Records’ and ‘Family Tree’. This is where you find the indexed records available to search, and the collaborative family tree that people contribute to respectively. But FamilySearch contains much more than just these two sections and I’d like to encourage you to explore beyond this. I spend a lot of time lurking in the ‘Catalog’ section, where so much more is available to see, though much is unindexed and you need to be quite focused in your search. I will talk a little more about the Catalog on another occasion, because today I want to let you know about the ‘Books’ section.
The FamilySearch Digital Library – a great free genealogical resource
‘Books’ (or more properly the ‘FamilySearch Digital Library’) has become a delightful treasure trove of easily accessible information that you may have otherwise had no access to. FamilySearch has been working hard to improve this section. Over 375000 books, journals, family histories and local histories are indexed here. Most of these are fully accessible. Even those that aren’t yet fully available due to copyright have generous snippets of content available and can be useful. The number of items available to search will dramatically increase as they are checking copyright status individually for each book and making them available as quickly as they can.
Checking it out…
The section has become much more intuitive to use and easy to search. Handy hint: if you are searching two or more terms, don’t just list them one after the other or you will get a cumulative number of hits. Make it a Boolean search to find items containing both terms. For example, Swinbourne AND Birmingham rather than Swinbourne Birmingham.
I was delighted to find that a journal (‘Midland Ancestor‘) that I have subscribed to since 1985 appears to have its full run available on the site, which saves me trawling through back issues looking for occurrences of family names as I discover them. Even more usefully it gives me access to issues published before I took up my subscription. I found this journal popping up in the results for nearly every search I did.
I also managed to find a couple of published family histories covering potential branches of my tree, which I will be checking against documentation to verify; several historical tomes mentioning ancestors by name, some with illustrations of ancient documents that they signed, and some wills and probate inventories.
So, last night I made the mistake of quickly taking a look before I went to bed. Many hours later… you get the picture.
Take a look…
So if you haven’t checked out this section of FamilySearch recently, I highly recommend you find some time (not within a few hours of intending to sleep!) and go take a look. You can thank me later…