Centers Can Be A Genealogy Godsend
If you consider yourself a working genealogist but aren’t taking advantage of the Family History Center in your area, you are missing a for-sure good bet.
The Genealogical Society of Utah was organized in 1894 with a total library of 11 books. At its centennial mark last year, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City had 258,000 books. New book acquisitions number more than 1,000 each month. And, the library has a microfilm collection of nearly 2 million rolls; about 5,000 rolls are cataloged every month.
To ensure these resources are available to genealogists everywhere, hundreds of Family History Centers are located across America and throughout the world. It is almost a fact that wherever you find a Latter-day Saints church, you will find that special kind of public library - the Family History Center.
What are these books and what’s on these rolls of microfilm?
The books fall into three categories:
1. How-to
2. Family and area histories
3. Local and area records
New books on how to access such-and-such records pop up regularly and are a real boon to working genealogists. Need to know more about how to find Church of the Brethren records? Vital statistics form the Ukraine? Or even how to use Iowa state censuses? Chances are the center has something published to help you.
Two larger resources are family histories and local or area works. More and more people are writing their family’s stories, and many donate a copy of their work to the Family History Library.
Checking the card catalog reveals family histories for names from Abastine to Zumwaltis (I’m just guessing on those two!). The point is, don’t think your surname is so unusual that there has never been a book written about it, because you’d probably be wrong. These books can vary from a pamphlet of a few pages to a multipage, hard-bound tome - and they are certainly worth a look.
The other group of books is local or area records. Genealogical societies around the world are gathering and publishing their local records - cemetery transcriptions, vital courthouse records, newspaper abstracts, county histories. … No matter where your ancestral family lived, you can almost certainly find a published reference on that area in Salt Lake’s library. And of course, most of these books are available through your local Family History Center.
If you have visited a center, you have undoubtedly used the FamilySearch computer and its library card catalog, plus its huge databases of information. Chances are nearly 99 percent that you can find at least one of your ancestor’s name in one of these databases. The IGI (International Genealogical Index) and the Ancestral File are the two main databases on the FamilySearch program.
Ever wonder how the information gets into these databases?
Family information is shared into the Ancestral File by working genealogists everywhere, folks like you and me, which means documentation of that information is only as good as the submitter has found and listed. But with millions of family-linked names, it is a source worth checking. (“Family-linked” means the information is in pedigree lines.)
IGI information comes largely from the Home Records Extraction program. Anyone of any faith may volunteer to work on this project. The Family History Center makes paper copies from microfilmed vital or church records that are sent to a local coordinator. These coordinators work in their own homes, on their own computers, reading the records and entering the extracted names into the computer. I recently worked on a batch of 1906 marriages in Johnson County, Kansas. This volunteer work ultimately benefits everybody.
Family History Centers are sprinkled all over Washington: three in Spokane and Vancouver, one in Richland and in dozens of other towns. To find one, ask any Mormon neighbor, any genealogist, look in telephone books or drop me a note in care of this paper.
Earlier, I spoke about new how-to books and ethnic guides; a case in point is a very special resource guide that just came to my attention.
“China Connection: Finding Ancestral Roots for Chinese in America,” by Jeanie W. Chooey Low, is a compact guide for doing Chinese-American family history research. Low included background information on historical and economic factors that influenced early Chinese immigration to America. Her emphasis is the period of the Chinese Exclusion Acts from 1882 to 1943 which affected Chinese immigration to the United States and the creation of “paper names” for some Chinese-American families.
Paper names were created by immigrant Chinese to help them stay in America when fear of deportation and low immigration quotas were hindering immigration. After the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, when most official birth records were destroyed, these paper names helped U.S.-born Chinese remain in the states. Hassles over these alternate names continued into the 1960s.
Low’s research was carefully done from public and private sources. With this book you will learn how and where to obtain records, such as Angel Island immigration interviews and Chinese mortuary records. Hints on how to translate Chinese gravestones and how to recognize Chinese numbers are included. Resources, addresses, charts and illustrations, plus a bibliography for more reading, make this 65-page book a must for those with Chinese-American heritage. Order the book, $13.95 postpaid, from the JWC Low Co., PO Box 472012, San Francisco, CA, 94147.
A Heritage Quest Workshop will be Sept. 9 at the Port Angeles Senior Center, 7th and Peabody Streets, Port Angeles, Wash., 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. If you’re considering a trip to the Olympic Peninsula this summer, time it to coincide with the workshop. Heritage Quest Workshops are informative, fun - and you’ll get a year’s subscription to the HQ magazine! Call (360) 417-2384 between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. for more information.
Today’s trivia
Even the Wall Street Journal carries genealogy stories. Alice Sprow of Spokane sent a clipping about a father-and-son team in Sunbury, Ohio, who collect information on Ohio’s 6,000 ghost towns. The men figure they have another 2,000 to find. Who would have guessed?
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