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Books Directories & Historic News

History From Directories, News & Books
This page summarizes the various posts involving using newspapers or books for your genealogical research. All of the links below are within our blog and most of the pages have further links to external sites.

Maps and Directories
  • Old Phone and City Directories are very helpful in tracking our ancestors through time. HeritageQuest is available through libraries such as the Seattle Public Library. Conveniently enough, with a library card, you can search these even at home. Our discussion about city directories illustrates how much more you can learn about ancestors than from straight government records.
  • Sanborn Fire Maps can help you find a house that was torn down, or experienced an address change. Most libraries have Sanborn Maps for the state in which the library is located. The Library of Congress has older Maps for all 50 states.
  • Our site stories about Maps and Directories may be found here.
Newspapers
  • The days of going through many rolls of microfilm to find that single elusive clipping are, mostly, gone from our modern research. The researcher can now often find that wedding announcement of an ancestor just back from WW1 or of how bad the Spanish Flu was in Western Washington. The best known resource is the Ancestry-affiliated Newspapers dot com, but there are various different versions, some of which are available at no cost. Our Stories on newspaper research for genealogy and history are found here.
  • Proquest Newspaper Access from Libraries - A list of newspaper feeds, available for FREE, from Western Washington libraries that have reciprocal card access with Timberland Regional Library. While these are "current" feeds, some do go back to 1970 and they are very helpful for picking up obituaries for most places if a relative died in the last 30 years.
  • Library of Congress Newspaper Archive - More than it says, this page has leads to literally hundreds (or maybe more) newspapers, many of which can be accessed for free. While newspapers dot com is the best known and most comprehensive historical newspaper site, you either have to pay for a subscription or go to our local Ocean Shores FamilySearch Center. Some libraries outside our area do have a library edition of newspapers dot com, which is where I got my family story that is on the linked page.
Books
  • Searching Online Books for Family History - Results for Ocean Shores people using four different "genealogy book" portals
  • Google Books - Introduction - this introduces the other Google Books posts
  • Interlibrary Loans and Worldcat
    • Using Worldcat for Genealogy Research - Worldcat can bring the world to your fingertips. It has almost every book that was published that may be of interest to a genealogy research. Via interlibrary loan, you can look through many of them at home. TRL and the Washington State Library provide interlibrary loans for free (sometimes). Ocean Shores Library charges a nominal sum for interlibrary loans. Either way, it is a lot cheaper than driving to Spokane to get that elusive book. Of course, before you get an interlibrary loan, try the Google Books or Internet Archive route and you may simply be able to download that book
    • There's added detail on using interlibary loans in the first part, here, of our post series on nearby libraries.
  • Finding Books!, there is a new series of posts on finding books for a genealogy project
    • The series starts here. Part 1involves getting books on a small town's history. Part 2 involves a review of "the best" genealogy libraries.
    •  Our site search also brings up books here (paper version) and here (online books).
  • Some of these posts talk about paper books, some talk about online books, but there are a lot of ways to get your very own electronic version that takes up no room and is absolutely FREE.
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