Over the last several days, I’ve been going back and looking at websites with digitized books that I use quite often, but haven’t written about for some time. I reviewed the books at HeritageQuest Online, and yesterday I brought you up-to-date on Google books. Today I’m reviewing the books at the Family History Archives, currently residing on BYU servers.
You can access the collection several ways – the easiest by just bookmarking the home page and going directly to it. You may also get there by going to FamilySearch.org, clicking on “Search Records,” then “Historical Books.” Note that you want to do all this using Internet Explorer or Firefox. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll find that the links don’t work using your Safari browser.
Enormous Growth
When Dollarhide reviewed the site for me in September of 2006, the site had 5,084 searchable books posted. As of this morning, I see that there are now 30,736 items online and searchable at the website. This is really amazing, and it makes the site by far the best place to search genealogy and local history books online. Granted, Google may search more books, but those books cover everything from agriculture to zoology. Genealogy just happens to be one category of books, out of thousands.
Keyword Search
You can search the books in more than one way. Do you want to search for books based on the cataloger’s descriptions, or do you want to do a “full text search?” By filling in the Keyword Search box for Surname, Author, and Title, you will be searching on the cataloger’s descriptions, essentially the same descriptions as found in the Family History Library catalog. This is the way to go initially if you’re looking for what family books with quantities of data on your name of interest are currently available. If you want to find every reference to a specific name, no matter whether cataloged or not, fill in the name, place, or phrase exactly as you want to find it, using quotes to limit the search, using the “Search all:” box. Also click on “Search full text for additional results.” When you get your results, click on the title of the first book you wish to look at, and the page with with name or phrase you searched for will come up. Searching for a common surname alone, using this technique is basically a waste of time though, as I’ll explain later.
Advanced Search
There is also an advanced search that allows the user to do more detailed searches, even limiting the search to specific collections.
Browse
The collection can also be browsed. Browsing starts with books that have numbers at the beginning of the title, such as 1849—1887, Trumball County, Ohio. If you wish to skip through the alphabet, you can skip up to 20 browsing pages at a time by clicking on the “next page” arrow in the lower right hand corner of the page. You can narrow the browse to the following categories:
- Browse All
- Family History Book Collection
- Family History – Serials
- Family History – Filipino cards
- Family History – Liahona – Elders Journal
- Family History – Oral Histories
- Family History – Medieval
- Gazetteers
Search Results
In searching for the Canfield family, I found eleven entries in the cataloger’s descriptions versus Dollarhide’s finding of eight in September of 2006. If I “Search All,” I get fifteen books versus Dollarhide’s eleven matches in 2006. Dollarhide also searched on the word Canfield, clicking on the box for Search Full Text for additional results, and then “Search All,” getting an unmanageable 2,136 hits in 2006. I couldn’t even get the search engine to attempt the search today – so switched to the advanced search to see how many books had references to the word “Canfield,” After a search that took a couple minutes, the report came back with 1,718 books with the word Canfield in them – many multiple times. This tells me that you’d better limit your search if you’re going to search every page of every book. I searched for “Henry Canfield” and got two hits in the basic search, and 20 hits using the advanced search. Not bad at all!
Participating Libraries
The following libraries are participating in the project: Harold B. Lee Library (BYU Provo), BYU Hawaii, BYU Idaho, LDS Business College, Family History Library, Church History Library, Allen County Public Library, Houston Public Library (Clayton), and Mid-Continent Public Library.
