Monday Memories--digitized ancestors
There are not many in my immediate family interested in genealogy, but if I point, they'll look. I want to mention a wonderful source for your memories available only through your public library (if it subscribes), The HeritageQuest Online, a book collection made up of 7,922 family histories, 12,035 local histories and 258 primary sources with the 1790-1930 census images. It has been on microfilm for some years, but few libraries owned it because of the high cost. It is a ProQuest product and can be accessed at subscribing libraries (I use Upper Arlington Public Library) or by remote access using your own computer and library card. Sometimes library consortia buy it and make it available to the entire state system (I'm not sure about Ohio and whether what I access is in a consortia).I came across this source just browsing at my library about two weeks ago. I suppose it was publicized, but I hadn't seen it or wasn't doing genealogy just then. The quality and depth is breath taking. You can search by people, place and keyword; you can browse titles with bibliographical data and links. I could easily use the indexes and find the correct pages of the on-line books within this database. Printing the right page was a bit tricky, but considering that in the past you might have had to travel hundreds of miles to examine these sources after frustrating hours of tracking them down, what's a few dollars for printing?
Also at my library, and maybe yours, is the Ancestry.com collection. It duplicates some of Heritage Quest, has some really nice browsing features, but the images aren't as good. My library doesn't allow remote access, but here is a link to the one at Columbia University just so you can see what's in it.
These sources are where I found the photocopy (not just record) of my grandfather's WWI 1918 draft card from Lee County, IL; my great grandfather's public land purchases; the Revolutionary War pension petition by the widows of my don't-know-how-many gggg grandfathers in Virginia; the address of the house where my husband's great grandmother lived in Beaver Co. PA before her husband disappeared. Folks, I've seen a lot of on-line material in my professional and personal life with libraries, and these--for the memories--just blew me away.
Because of name changes, our female family members are difficult to track, so have fun looking for your "lost mothers" in an ever growing digital universe of sources.
P.S. There are also many state archives free on the internet for which you don't need any library access.
family history, genealogical websites, public library, digitized documents, U.S. census
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