FAMILY HISTORY BOOKS ONLINE
©2008 by Donald R. Snow
Sections of the Class Notes
This page was last updated 2008-02-13.
Return to the Hyde Park Family History Centre Home Page or the Events Page or the Utah Valley PAF Users Group Home Page or Don's Class Listings Page.
INTRODUCTION
- Instructors are Elder and Sister Donald
R. and Diane M. Snow, England London Mission, Hyde Park Family History Centre
(snowd@math.byu.edu, dms34@juno.com)
- These notes with active Internet links
are posted on the Utah Valley PAF Users Group website -
http://uvpafug.org under Class Outlines, Don's
Listings.
- There are many full-text books posted on
the Internet and many contain family history and place information.
These notes give information on accessing some of
these.
FAMILY
HISTORY LIBRARY CATALOG
- The Family
History Library Catalog (FHLC) on FamilySearch.org is now listing FH
books which have been digitized; these are posted online in Brigham Young
University's Family History Archives
- For
such digitized volumes the FHLC has the words written in red: "To view
a digital version of this book click here." and clicking on "Here" takes you to the
entire digitized book posted on the BYU Harold B. Lee Library web site
(see next paragraph)
- Examples
- Several thousand volumes are
online so far -- to find all such in the FHLC, see the next paragraph
- To be digitized and posted volumes must be out
of copyright or the copyright holder must have given permission
BYU'S HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY ONLINE COLLECTIONS
- The Family History Library in Salt Lake City is
working with the Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library to
digitize and post online their FH volumes
- BYU Family History Archives -- http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/
- These digitized volumes are pdf (Portable
Document Format) and are therefore completely
searchable for any names or words in the entire text.
- Click on Advanced Search (
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/search.php )
for more detailed searches and to see the kinds of digitized records they have
- In Advanced Search you can search on just the
Family Histories collections by going to the lower pane and selecting, for
example, Family Histories 1, Family Histories 2, etc. -- each set has several hundred
volumes
- Click to move the selected set over to the right
pane
- For estimates on how many volumes
are in each Family History set do an advanced search on each set
for something like "." (without the quotes) that would occur
in nearly all volumes -- Family Histories 1 has at least 320 volumes,
Family Histories 2 has at least 280 volumes, etc.
- Each of these titles in the FHLC has the
note, "To view a digital version of this book click here." in red
-
This gives a way to find all such digitized volumes in the FHLC.
- The list and how to search all the BYU
Library Online Collections, including photographs, is at --
http://www.lib.byu.edu/online.html
GOOGLE BOOKS
- Google has signed contracts with many large libraries
to digitize millions of their books and post them online.
- Most
are already out of copyright, but they have permission to post some still in
copyright
- Go to http://books.google.com/ or from
http://www.google.com you can get to it by clicking on More, then
Book Search
- To do a search in all
their volumes for a complete name enter the name in quotes, e.g. “Brigham Young”
- To search only those volumes that are full text go to the Advanced Book Search and
set it to search only Full View texts
- Your term shows up highlighted in yellow
on the page of the digitized books
- Where Google doesn't have permission to post the
entire volume you only see a snippet of the
page with the search term highlighted and information on where you can see or purchase the
volume.
OTHER ONLINE FAMILY HISTORY BOOKS
ASSIGNMENT
- Go to Google Books and see if you can
find a volume containing the name of one of your ancestors, e.g. "Erastus
Snow".
- Go to one of the websites and find a book
that contains information on a place some of your ancestors lived, e.g.
Marylebone, Middlesex.
- Do a Google or other search for "free
full text books online" (without the quotes) and see the list of websites that
comes up.
Return to the Hyde Park Family History Centre Home Page or the Events Page or the Utah Valley PAF Users Group Home Page or Don's Class Listings Page.