Leaving the Past to the Future 4: Digital Sources

In previous posts in this series, I have mentioned my personal, digitized family history files, genealogical software programs and my paperless habits.

Sourcing information is, of course, the most important thing we do in building our family trees. In years past many family historians visited local LDS Family History Centers (now called FamilySearch Centers), or the main library in Salt Lake City, where microfilms of old parish registers, for example, could be borrowed to search for information about births, marriages and deaths.

Or people wrote letters to archives, museums and country record offices for any information they might have on local communities or people, as my aunt did in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Or they may have consulted Online Parish Clerks in the UK like me or volunteers providing similar assistance in other parts of the world.

The world has moved on. Now we mostly review data in digital form on major genealogical websites, like Ancestry, FindMyPast The Genealogist, MyHeritage, or ScotlandsPeople, both mainly through subscriptions. If you cannot afford the fees for accessing the commercial databases, you might find them using the computers set up at municipal libraries, the FamilySearch Centers or local family history society offices. Some people wait for those special free days offered by some commercial site providers, for example, around Armistice Day to look at military documents or St. Patrick’s Day for Irish records.

But there is a growing number of other websites where information about ancestors can be freely found in digital format, especially important for those of us with limited shelf space or a disinclination for printed material.

Helen Osborn, an English professional genealogist, wrote an excellent piece for the November 2022 issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine titled, Build your own Digital Reference Library. In it she documented where to find and how to access family history information books on some of the major and minor websites and reminding us of some sources we may have used in the past but forgotten.

Among those highlighted were libraries where you can acquire or just borrow books: the library at familysearch, Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive. Helen is based in the UK so many of her sources for documents or transcripts are also there: specialist societies like the Surtees Society, the British Record Society and the Harleian Society; local, civic or country record societies such as the London Record Society, British History Online, Bristol Record Society,  the Huguenot Society, or the Navy Records Society.

In the UK’s The National Archives has dozens of published calendars listing important historical records of use to genealogists. Information provided by similar groups in many other countries can I’m sure be found. In the US, use the services provided by their National Archives.

Digital journals are important sources of material that can help the search for ancestors. JSTOR has an immense library of academic studies that can be read online or accessed through a private subscription or a local library. Universities and professional organizations offer publications of all kinds. You need only search for subjects or localities of interest to come up with relevant groups or articles.

Some other sources I have discovered and used include: the Digital Public Library of America, the British Library, Project Gutenberg and the Smithsonian Libraries. Closer to home is the Library and Archives Canada.

Newspapers are a valuable resource for information about people and events. I frequently use The British Newspaper Archive, Newspapers.com (by Ancestry), Peel’s Prairie Provinces now also part of Internet Archive and Chronicling America at the Library of Congress.

If your interest is in Medieval Genealogy, then try Some Notes on Medieval English Genealogy. If it is in Scotland consult the digital resources of the National Library of Scotland, especially for maps. The Statistical Accounts of Scotland will give you substantial information about the geography, people and economy of the country during the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries.

The National Genealogical Society (US) has a list of Eighteen Important Free Websites for Genealogy Research. FamilySearch, already mentioned for books, has a whole webpage dedicated to Using the internet for family history research. Check it out.

I still recommend contacting local record offices, archives, libraries and family history societies, for material pertinent to your research. If you cannot get to their offices, consider hiring a local consultant to search for and make copies of documents. Consider joining a major genealogical society like the Society for Genealogists to access millions of records online.

We live in a digital world now. There is no going back. But that is a good thing as we can now access millions of books and other published material right from our (or someone else’s) computers.

I have listed just a few digital sources here. I know there are dozens of others.

Whatever your interest is, location you want to know more about, family or person you want information about, first try a Google search. My recent search for “genealogy digital sources” brought up over 53 million hits. Narrowing it down to “free genealogy digital sources” still resulted in over 39 million sites. That’s a pretty big starting point.

Leaving the Past to the Future 3: Going Paperless

Like many people, I have gone increasingly paperless in my day-to-day life and in my genealogical studies. When we first moved to a condo several years ago, I no longer had the room for walls of bookcases or filing cabinets. We are now back in a large house, but over the past few years I developed the habit of not keeping a lot of paper files, other than a few I need that contain important personal or financial papers.

And, of course, those special family memorabilia and historical documents that are preserved in binders.

I admit I still have and purchase printed books, mainly because I find them useful in much of my research. It is often handier to be able to, firstly, read and mark up pages with yellow high-lighter or turn down the corners where there is information I will want to find later. My old schoolteachers would roll over in their graves to know I desecrate books that way, but these are mostly used books I acquired on the Internet for little cost and will undoubtedly be thrown away at some point when I am finished with them or finished period.

My current bookshelves do not take up as much space as my photo albums did. These are now consigned to plastic bins in our storage space. I have not got the heart to throw them out yet even though they have all been scanned and put online where family members can pursue the pictures (blog post Digitizing Memories 7 March 2017). One of our children might toss them in the future but that will be their burden.

A future project will be to describe the provenance of all my important keepsakes. Hopefully that will help our family to decide to keep them for posterity and future family historians. I believe it is important to collect items used by family members and to preserve them. But they need to have explanations about who owned them and what significance they might have to our family’s history.

Of great importance in keeping digital files is making sure you don’t inadvertently delete them or lose them in a hard drive crash. I have had that unfortunate experience in the past and it took some effort to reconstruct my genealogy records. Luckily, I had most of my files and folders on a separate storage device and was able to secure a family tree from another relative, although it was a few years out-of-date.

The use of CDs, DVDs, USB memory sticks or another hard drive has been important in preserving data in the past. Having the information on other devices, whether stored in your own home or with a friend or relative, offers protection against fire or other loss. Keeping duplicate files in more than one place, at least one of them outside your home, may be important to insure they are safe and accessible. The older technologies offered easy solutions to preserving the data, but their life span is a problem. Storage devices should be checked regularly, or just routinely replaced.

In my post of 4 March 2024 (Leaving the Past to the Future 1: Organizing Your Information) it should have been obvious that all the files I keep on my computer are digital. But what I did not mention is that I keep a copy of them in the Cloud. 

Since my last computer crash a few years ago, I have kept my files in remote computer data storage. That includes all manner of files from typewritten to scanned documents and audio/visual files. Once there it can be retrieved and shared.

The commercial service program I use (Carbonite) copies files constantly.  As of March 11^th, I have 363,840 files backed up (43,080 new ones just this month). It does cost a bit (Cdn$134 per year) but worth it to insure against losing some valuable information in the future.

I can retrieve parts or all or the library at any time, no matter where I am or what device I am using. Storage is secure, password protected, although I can also invite others to access the data, like my daughter who assists me with my IT activities.

For more about being a paperless genealogist or looking for advice and help on how to do it, just do a Google search for “paperless genealogy” and be amazed at the information you find: blogs, books, presentations, newsletters, magazine articles, technology, etc.

I will talk about paperless research sources and techniques in another post.

Upcoming Presentations

 I am presenting two talks to the Society of Genealogists later this year:

On 11 July 2024 I will talk about Genealogy and the Little Ice Age. See here for more details.

On 8 August 2024 I will present Stormy Weather: events that changed our ancestors' fortunes. See here for more details.