The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Family History Library's Web site better than ever
This column was published Dec. 10, 2000
If you haven't visited the Family History Library's World Wide Web site recently, rush directly to your computer, power it up and get online. You're in for a real treat.
Recently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints totally redesigned its Web site, including the virtual Family History Library pages. The improvements are spectacular, which is saying a lot considering that the old site was excellent.
The Family History Library, the world's largest genealogical library, isn't of interest only to Mormons or people researching Mormon genealogies. The records collection contains more than 2.2 million rolls of microfilmed genealogical records, 742,000 microfiche, 300,000 books and 4,500 periodicals. It also includes the Ancestral File database, which contains approximately 35.6 million lineage-linked names and the International Genealogical Index database, which contains approximately 600 million individual names.
The library includes records from the United States, Canada, the British Isles, Europe, Scandinavia, Latin American, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Africa.
Last year, the collection increased by an average of 4,100 rolls of microfilm and 700 books each month. The library has more than 240 cameras currently microfilming records in nearly 44 countries. These vast resources are available to anyone, either at the library in Salt Lake City or through more than 3,400 Family History Centers operating in 75 countries and territories, and increasingly, via the World Wide Web.
Whether it's your first visit to this incredible resource, or your first since the Web site was revised, I would suggest you spend a few minutes just cruising around, finding what's there and how to use the resources.
Tune your browser to lds.org. This is the church's main page. Arriving there, click on the words "Family History" in the left-hand column. When the page loads, you will be presented with three choices, "Search for Ancestors," "Share Information" and "Family History Library Catalog."
Various features on these pages allow an incredible amount of genealogical searching from the comfort of your home. A column affords inadequate space to provide details about such an expansive service, so we'll focus on just one fantastic resource on this site: the Family History Library Catalog. Click on those words and a new page will load. From there you will be able to conduct searches by place, surname or by author's name. This will search the entire library's holdings for resources that might be valuable to you.
As an experiment, I typed in some of the surnames I research. "Willes" returned 15 holdings that contain Willes names. Next I typed in "Willis," a variant spelling. Voila! In a flash I had 199 matching hits. "Day," a relatively uncommon surname, produced 276 hits. "Barnes" garnered 321. "McKenzie" tallied 174.
The titles of some of these hits make it obvious that they might contain information of value to me, but often there isn't a clue.
For instance, I would never dream of looking in "Ancestors and descendants of Christopher Santford and Eura (Drake) Chritton and related families by Esther Spreen and Nancy Turnipseed." (No, I'm not making up that name!)
But the fact that the computer listed this when I searched for Day surnames means there are Days in it. So, I clicked on the hyperlink that was displayed with it and was presented with expanded information.
I learned that Christopher Santford Chritton was born in 1793 in Virginia. He married Eura Eaton Drake (1798-1865). They settled in Indiana, where he died in 1850. They had 17 children. Descendants are scattered throughout the United States. Genealogical information was available on Chritton, Day, Fenner, Haldeman, Merriman, Tombaugh and Warfield families.
Since my Days came out of Virginia, this might be worth a gander. If any of the surnames mentioned also appear in my family, that's another clue. If any of my Days also lived in Indiana, that's another key.
From the comfort of my home office, I can make a judgment on whether I want to research the contents of this, or any other, book.
No, I can't read the book online. Not yet. But I can cut and paste the library's information into a document in my computer for future reference and evaluation, without even having to pick up a pen or pencil and scribble a note.
Sometimes, deep in a genealogical groove, I find myself wishing I could have lived in some earlier time. But that's not a very romantic idea when I'm doing genealogical research by computer. No way do I want to go back to the typewriter, much less to pen and pencil.
What a marvelous era we live in. What marvelous resources are available to genealogists today. I'll devote my next few columns to exploring some of the other resources online at the Family History Library.