Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Tuesday's Tip - Check Out Scribd Genealogy Books and Documents

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Search Scribd.com for genealogy books and documents that might help your education and research.

www.Scribd.com is a website that publishes digital books and websites that can be browsed and downloaded.  A user can subscribe for $8.95 per month and read many books, or have a free account and read free books and documents.  A user can sign up for an account and get 14 days free.  I have a free account at this time.

Here is the results page after searching for "genealogy":


I clicked on one of the books shown, and was able to add the book to my "Library" to read:


However, I have to subscribe to Scribd in order to read the book.

Further down the search results page are "Documents" that have been uploaded by users like me:


There are 182 documents with the terms "seaver" and "genealogy."

I used the PDF format three years ago to upload genealogy reports created by genealogy software in order to put my research online in a document format.  Here is the front page of one of my reports on Scribd:



Further down the report, the text looks like this - it's a classical descendants narrative report, with source citations (as end notes) but no text notes (the reports were too big with text notes!):


How did I do this?  See my blog post Updating my Online Genealogy Ancestral Reports (published 1 October 2012) for the process.  I have links to all 16 of my Scribd reports on my Randy's Genealogy page here on Genea-Musings.  I can remove any of my reports from Scribd whenever I choose to - for instance, I might want to update them at some time.  If I died tomorrow, Scribd has a fairly recent summary of my genealogy research for posterity - without text notes or media items, of course!

My documents are free to download (use the blue "Download" button), and free to read, by readers on Scribd.  A Google search for an ancestral couple finds the appropriate report on Scribd.  What's not to like?  It's "cousin bait" and "ancestral legacy" in one swell foop. 

I encourage readers to go search for their ancestral families on Scribd.com - you may be surprised!  There may be books or documents available that you would like to read.  Try it out.  If you don't want a subscription, then don't give them your credit card.

Readers should consider putting their narrative reports on Scribd.com as "cousin bait" and "ancestral legacy."  Be sure to put your contact information (I used my email address and blog URL) so that readers can contact you.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/08/tuesdays-tip-check-out-scribd-genealogy.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.



1 comment:

M. Diane Rogers said...

Great idea to add narrative reports on Scribd. I did a 'genealogy' search and didn't get as many results as you did, but nice to see a Canadian book up front! I will try another few searches and keep Scribd in mind.