Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Tuesday's Tip - Find Periodical Sources in PERSI - the Periodical Source Index on FindMyPast

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  The updated Periodical Source Index (PERSI) is available on www.FindMyPast.com - use it to find periodical articles about your ancestors or ancestral places.

The Periodical Source Index (PERSI) is still on HeritageQuestOnline, and it is still available on Ancestry.com, and in book form at many libraries.  However, the most recent version of PERSI is now on FindMyPast (www.findmypast.com), a subscription genealogy website.  See their announcement from July 2013 here.  It includes;

"During the past 30 years, the ACPL Genealogy Center has created more than 2.5 million searchable records in PERSI, indexing every article from more than 8,000 different periodicals, including magazines, newsletters and journals, according to location, topic, surname, ethnicity and methodology. In the coming months,findmypast.com will launch the most complete version of PERSI online. Once launched, findmypast.com will work in tandem with the Genealogy Center to provide frequent updates to the collection as new entries are added.

"PERSI has become an essential tool in helping genealogists and family historians locate valuable information, and this new partnership with findmypast.com will transform PERSI into an even more powerful resource.  Findmypast.com subscribers will be able to search and view digitized images of the articles, allowing unprecedented access to the information contained in these periodicals."
I had not checked for it recently, so, since I have a FindMyPast.com subscription, I wanted to check it out.

From the home page, it is difficult to find.  I found it through the "US and world Newspapers" link, and the PERSI landing page is at http://search.findmypast.com/search/periodical-source-index .Here is what that page looks like:


I entered "seaver" in the last name field on the screen above, clicked on "Search" and there were 39 matches:


I clicked on the first match, and saw a summary of an entry in the Periodical Source Index (PERSI):


It told me that the "Henry Seaver Bible, 1833-1922, TN" article was in Volume 12, No. 3 (Mar 1994) of the Holston Pathfinder periodical, and was in the Allen County Public Library at call number 975.501 W27htga.  Allen County Public Library has issues from Number 1 to 83 (1983-2003).

I never would have thought to look in that periodical...

I perused thel ist of 39 matches a little further, and saw an interesting entry:


There was an article about the not-so-famous geneablogger and sometime presenter in the April 2012 issue of the Orange County California Genealogical Society Newsletter.  Who knew?

Some guidelines for readers and researchers:

*  PERSI is an index for article titles and authors in periodicals.  A searcher can enter search fields for Who, Where and Keyword.  It appears that the Last Name is required, and the Location and/or Keyword are optional.  A user can filter the search results by Country, State, County, City/Town, Subject, Article Keyword, Periodical, Publisher and Publication Date (with a date range of up to +/- 40 years if desired).  To make another search, the user will have to Clear all the Filters.

*  PERSI does not contain an every-name index for the articles that are indexed.  Only the title is indexed, plus the publication information.

*  PERSI contains only the genealogy and family history periodicals that have been submitted to Allen County Public Library for inclusion in the PERSI.  There are

*  A searcher should enter surnames to see what is available, but just entering a location and/or a keyword without a name may reveal a published list of records for a certain location.

*  If you find an article that you want to read, you can check the list of repositories that have the periodical issue at the bottom of the screen (not shown above) and contact that repository.  Or you can engage the research services of the Allen County Public Library’s Genealogy Center and order a copy of your periodical article. An “Article Request Form” can be downloaded as a PDF document here:www.genealogycenter.org/pdf/ArticleRequest.pdf.  The charge is $7.50 for each order form submitted (up to 6 requests per order form), and a 20 cent charge for each page copied.

I couldn't figure out if access to PERSI on FindMyPast.com is free for all researchers, or if the user needs to be a subscriber.  

The URL for this post is:

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm not a subscriber, and it let me search and see the main result page. Then it asked me to register "for free" which somehow means choosing a payment plan. So...yes, you can sort of search if you're not a subscriber, but you won't get much more than the name of the article, periodical and year

Jackie Corrigan said...

I don't believe PERSI is available on ancestry anymore.