Archive for the ‘libraries’ Category

Yesterday’s post about the Broome County Library Vital Records Index caught the eye of Phyllis Rogan, a reference librarian at Steele and she wrote to say that they have the Vital Records Index also.

So then she sent me an announcement about some happenings at Steele and I am very happy to pass this information on to our readers.

It is with great pleasure that the Genealogy Department of Steele Memorial Library announces the acquisition of local early Catholic Church Records on microfilm. Beginning in 1848 to1910, most film consists of Chemung County Churches but also includes churches in Addison, Waverly, Trumansburg, and Watkins Glen. The records are available for immediate use and can be found on the second floor of Steele Library in the microfilm department.  This provides researchers with early records previously unavailable.

The New York State Library is going to be open on Saturdays, starting this coming October 16th.  This story sounded too good to be true, but it has been verified.

For those of you that work during the week this is a golden opportunity to be able to take advantage of the unique collections and fingertip access to some of the best published and non-published resources for New York State ancestors.

If you have ever wonderd if your signing of online petitions has any impact, we suggest that it does.

Last September we told you that the State of Michigan was in a budget crisis and was planning on closing the state library.  We told you how to Save the Library of Michigan.

Well todays news is reported in the Lansing State Journal that the library is not only alive and well, but that the legislators have also voted to keep all of the non-Michigan books and research media available to genealogists as well.

Those of you Upstate New York Genealogy researchers that are working on Rochester, New York , Monroe County and the western part of New York State in general, are very fortunate.

The Monroe County Library System has been hard at work making much of their large genealogy / local history collection available online.  A discussion on one of the recent message boards caught my eye and decided we better review this site again.  See our previous posts about the Rochester Library.

The State of Michigan is in a budget crisis.  What a shock.  What state is not?  The myopic view of the current state administration is to do away with the State Library

You can help stop this idiocy by signing an online petition, it does not matter what state you live in, sign it anyway.  An interesting note is that when I just signed it there were only 393 signatories.  It would seem that 300 thousand would be more impressive.  Please sign the petition, do not put it off.

From an announcement by Dick Eastman at www.eogn.com the following in part:

We wrote about the partnership between the U.S Library of Congress and the photo hosting website, flickr dot com, back in January on this Blog.

Today I was reminded by Genealogy Reviews Online about this excellent resource from an article that Tim wrote about a Blogger in Washington, DC who has looked up some old views of DC and then recreated them with modern day subjects in pose. Pretty neat.

So after taking another look and doing a “New York State” search of the LOC collection, found several, a few of which are posted here.

Elissa Scalisse Powell, a Certified Genealogist, posted on the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) mail list, the following exciting information about a free web teleconference for genealogists at the Library of Congress this coming Wednesday, June 18th.

Invisible Ancestors: Ideas & Strategies for Recreating Their Stories: A Web Conference

When: Wednesday, June 18, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time), 1:00-2:00 p.m. Central Time

Many ancestors – early immigrants and pioneers, slaves, women, native peoples, and others do not have compiled biographies. They are invisible except in the historical record, through the census or other data collection entities. Where there are gaps in their history, the stories can be told through early travelogues, letters, diaries, other texts and printed ephemera, photographs and other visual media, and maps.