Using Digital Libraries: Search Strategies for Family Historians Elizabeth M. O’Neal PO Box 1259, Lompoc, CA 93436
[email protected] https://www.swangenealogy.net https://mydescendantsancestors.com Looking for books about your family history? You may be able to find them without leaving the comfort of your home! Millions of books have already been digitized and are free to use, as well as download to your personal library. Learn where to find the best digital book collections, how to strategically search them, and how to save your finds to your computer or cloud storage for later reference. Digital Libraries – Family History FamilySearch Digital Library - https://www.familysearch.org/library/books The newly-updated FamilySearch Digital Library contains more than 440,000 digitized genealogy and family history books and publications from the archives of family history libraries such as the Allen County Public Library, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and others. Included in the collection are family histories, county and local histories, genealogy magazines and how-to books, gazetteers, medieval histories and pedigrees. While some books are only viewable in a Family History Center, many can be viewed from – as well as downloaded to – your home computer. To access the FamilySearch Digital Library, visit FamilySearch.org, and click “Search” in the top menu. In the drop-down menu, select “Books.” On the home page of the digital library, you will see a simple search bar. Here, you can type in a surname, historical events, groups of people, or names of places. A search will cover every word of text.