Family Search & Digital Public Library

I just ran across an announcement of books becoming available on line easier through a joint effort of Family Search and the Digital Public Library. If you don't also subscribe to the NGS email announcement list, Up Front with NGS, you should consider subscribing. You don't need to be a member of the organization to receive their news releases.

I'm not familiar with the Digital Public Library yet, but it looks like a very interesting site with lots of information to explore.

Family Search is a site that I use a lot. It is the website of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. From their site you can reach the catalog to see what is available and plan a research trip to their library. If you can't travel there any time soon, you can request films be sent, for a fee, to your local Family History Center. If you don't know where that is, of course, you can look it up on the website as well!

For me the real treasure of this site is the items that are available in databases online. All kinds of records including census records, vital records and such can be found for any state and many, many foreign countries. Trees that people have completed and submitted are available and many other things. I could go on for hours about what is available and still miss many key things.

The one thing I've been having fun diving into and discovering lately though, are the various published works that are available through the website. There are many, many titles available and more are being added constantly. A couple months ago, while at the NYS Library, I made copies of some pages from an old genealogy about one branch of my family. In working with these pages and researching this family, I realized that one page was unreadable at the bottom and I was lacking the next page totally. I was thrilled to find the book on the Family Search website and obtain these two pages so that my work wasn't interrupted until I could return to Albany.

I'm not sure how expanded access to this library is going to work or what it actually means for the average users, but I have a feeling we are going to enjoy it even more! In the meantime, I have a new website to explore!