Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Tuesday's Tip - Check Out FamilySearch Wiki State Digital Collections Pages

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Check Out the FamilySearch.org Research Wiki for the Digital Record Collections for each state.

The FamilySearch.org Research Wiki (https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Main_Page) has been adding pages for each U.S. state listing the Digital Record Collections available for the specific state.  You can see the list of states here.

I counted articles for 32 states available as of today.  Two of my "favorite" states are not yet available - Massachusetts and California.  But New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are!

For instance, here is a screen shot of the top of the New York Digital Collections page:


The page is organized into topics (red headlines), and links to specific databases (blue), with explanatory text in black.  Databases in subscription websites (e.g., Ancestry, Fold3, World vital Records, etc.) are shown with a ($) indicator.  There are links to many free websites with record collections.  The topics include:

*  Vital Records
*  Biographies
*  Immigration Records
*  Land Records
*  Military Records
*  Naturalization Records
*  Newspapers
*  Obituaries
*  Probate Records
*  State Census
*  Tax Records

At the bottom of each page is a list of links to Related Articles for the State, as shown below for New York:



The Related Articles are grouped according to Topics, Counties and City, Extinct Counties, Major Repositories and Migration Routes.

These Digital Collection pages are very useful for researchers.  Hopefully, they will be kept up-to-date and additional links will be added as they become available on FamilySearch, Ancestry, Fold3, WorldVitalRecords, GenealogyBank, Archives, FindMyPast, AmericanAncestors, and other record collection providers.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/10/tguesdays-tip-check-out-familysearch.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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