Thursday, December 20, 2012

FamilySearch "Books" - More than Old Books!

I realized that I had not looked recently at the "Books" link on the FamilySearch home page.  So I had a free moment, and clicked on it.  It has changed considerably from the recent past, and it's probably much better.  There are certainly more resources there than there were a year ago.

Here's the home page screen:


The "Books" link is below the larger word "Family" on the screen above.

The "Family History Books" page has a search field (and a link for "Advanced Search" plus a description of the collection:


The description says:


Family History Books is a collection of more than 40,000 digitized genealogy and family history publications from the archives of some of the most important family history libraries in the world. The collection includes family histories, county and local histories, genealogy magazines and how-to books, gazetteers, and medieval histories and pedigrees. The valuable resources included in Family History Books come from the following partner institutions:

I entered the term "seaver" in the search field on the screen above, and clicked on "Search"


There were 713 matches for my search term.  In the left sidebar, under the term "Refine My Results," there are links for Books (484), Other (184), and Periodicals/Serials (45).

I clicked on the title of the first title, and saw the first page of the book selected (I scrolled down to see the title):



There is a menu line that has icons for save the file, printing the file, zooming, advancing pages, etc.  On the right, there is a list of Bookmarks for each page.

I was curious about the Other and Periodicals/Serials collections noted, and think that they include both unpublished manuscripts and printed town reports, but have not categorized or checked all of them.

This particular book is about one line of Seaver families in Massachusetts.  I had not read it before, but it has content that is of interest to me as a "collector of Seaver people."

The lesson learned here is that the "Books" collection on FamilySearch has over 40,000 tomes, and that they are well worth looking through.  My sense is that there are many works ion this collection that are not available on other online Book archives.  For instance, the Seaver book above was published in 1996.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/12/familysearch-books-more-than-books.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

Update:  Just before I was going to publish this, I had a BSOD event (that's Blue Screen of Death") that is the first one I've had on this desktop computer.  I was paging through the Seaver book above and have no clue what happened!   That's why you may have read one or two paragraphs of this post.


3 comments:

GeneJ said...

I ran into some technical issues not long ago when accessing and reviewing the books. While I didn't get the blue screen, I did experience freezing. In at least one case, the material I downloaded wouldn't open. I suspect there are real treasures in the collection, though. With time, I'm sure the bugs will be worked out.

Elizabeth Handler said...

Randy - thanks for this info! I found a book that I knew was "out there" (published 1976, microfilmed 1984) but had never seen. It took several minutes to load (1,418 pages), but wow - the information from this book on this Virginia-Kentucky Ashby family is tremendous with transcriptions of wills and other court records. I'll have to look up other surnames after I finish browsing through this book. Can't thank you enough!

Celia Lewis said...

I can't believe you had a free moment, Randy! As for the Books - I've delved in several times, and usually drowned in practical relevant wonderful books on my early settlers in particular. Amazing stuff. Thanks for sharing and reminding us to check this out.