Last week I wrote about the online Sanborn Fire Maps, available
from UMI, a division of Bell and Howell Information & Learning. This week
I had a chance to use UMI’s other big genealogy resource: Genealogy &
Local History Online.
Genealogy & Local History Online provides a unique, ongoing
collection of research materials for tracing family lineage and American culture.
This collection contains genealogies, local histories, primary source materials,
and genealogical and local history serials. When complete, Genealogy & Local
History Online will encompass over 7 million pages of materials from all 50
states. Quoting from the Web site:
ProQuest Information and Learning Company will digitize the
entire Genealogy & Local History collection over two to three years.
We will digitize genealogies first, followed by local histories, serials,
and primary source materials. Because the collection covers the thirteen colonies
first and moves westward, we are scanning in the sequence found in the
order of the units in the microfilm collection. At launch, Genealogy &
Local History Online contains over one thousand family histories. New content will
be added to Genealogy & Local History Online monthly. We anticipate
that digitization of Genealogy & Local History Online will be complete
by 2003.
The main page offers searches in three categories:
- Search for People
- Search for Places
- Search Publications
I first selected a "Search for Publication." On the
next screen, I entered my own surname in the search box. The first item to appear
was "The Eastmans of Tamworth: a short history of William Eastman, first
settler of Tamworth, New Hampshire, his sons and certain of his descendants"
by Harland Eastman. I have seen this slim book before and have even met the
author a few times. It is a very good reference covering one small branch of
the family.
I clicked on that title and a new page appeared, giving the following:
- Top of Form
- Title page
-
Table
of contents
- Foreward
- Genealogical
chart
- Part I—William of Tamworth and his children
- Part II—Descendants of Stephen, grandson of William
- Part III—Descendants of John, grandson of William
- Footnotes
- Ancestry of William Tamworth
- Index
- Back matter
- Bottom of Form
Each of the above was highlighted as a hyperlink. All I had to
do was click on any of the links, and soon that page appeared on my screen.
The images were a bit small but quite readable. The display can be magnified
200 percent or 400 percent for those texts that are difficult to read. A 400 percent display resulted
in very large letters being displayed on the screen, a great tool when trying
to decode cryptic or faded text.
Below each page image, a set of icons allowed me to move forward
and backward. By click on the Forward icon, the next page appeared. Clicking
on the Back icon resulted in a display of the previous page. I could also jump
directly to a different page by entering the page number in the "Go To"
box. I also could print a page on my local printer. The whole thing was intuitive
and easy to navigate.
The best part, in my opinion, is the ability to download content
to your local hard drive. You can download a page image in Adobe Acrobat,and
I was quite surprised to see that you can even download the entire book. The
forty-nine-page booklet that I was looking at resulted in a bit more than a three-megabyte
file that I downloaded.
You can view the pages online in almost any Web browser on Windows,
Macintosh, UNIX, Linux or even some other operating systems. The pages you download
and store on your local hard drive are in Adobe Acrobat format, which is also
supported on the operating systems I just mentioned.
Continuing with my exploration, I returned to the original menu
screen and selected a People search. This option allows you to enter a person’s
name, and all of the books and magazines in the database that have that person’s
name will be listed. You can enter names either as last name, first name (Smith,
John) or as first name, last name (John Smith). Genealogy & Local History
Online is designed so that your search results will be retrieved, regardless
of the order in which you enter names. You can also enter several names, combining
them with Boolean operators (John Smith AND Pat Lee).
The program quickly returns a list of books containing that name.
You can click on a book’s title and then click on "hits" to quickly
find the pages where that name appears. Once you display the pages on your screen,
you can print them on your own printer, or store them as Adobe Acrobat files
on your hard drive.
A search for places was very similar: enter a town, county and
state, and all books mentioning that location quickly appear. You can quickly
go to the pages referenced and view them, print them, or download them.
Genealogy & Local History Online is a great genealogy resource.
The capability to download entire books to your hard drive is unusual; I do
not remember any other major genealogy site that offers that capability.
Genealogy & Local History Online is a bit expensive, however.
In fact, the company’s Web site doesn’t even list the prices. Instead,
an e-mail contact is given for you to obtain pricing information for your company
or organization. The expectation is that most genealogists will go to a major
library in order to access Genealogy & Local History Online. Most of Bell
and Howell Information & Learning’s customers are large public libraries,
university libraries or corporations with a need to access research materials
of all kinds. The Genealogy & Local History Online database is just one
of the many available resources.
For more information about Genealogy & Local History Online,
go to genealogy.umi.com
Dick Eastman Online
