Getting Books - 4 Parts and counting

FamilySearch Library
Link is here

Titled another way, this post might have been "identify it, find it, and bring it home." Carrie Cartwright Bergquist says "I'm a paper person." Personally, I'm more of a "download bits person." Either way, a lot of what happens is the same. This is part of a continuing series on finding that "special book or document."

In the meantime, here's a "hot tip." Any documents found from this series can also be searched for from our local Ocean Shores FamilySearch Center. It's got many online databases that are simply not available within a two-day trip from Western Washington.

Simple Way to Get Date Information

As it turns out, there is no need to keep dates of events consigned to either a paper file or in a document stored for reference. While our own site provides a good reference for those grave markers that say "Joseph Goggins died January 28, 1816, aged 27 years, 2 months and 7 days" on Simply ask Google for simple date questions! This probably works with other search engines as well. Certainly duckduckgo provides the answers, though not quite in as big type at the top of the search. Ditto for Yahoo. Usually a simpler query gets better results than an involved question.

Example 1 includes official census day dates. One obtains the same results from "census day 1790." Apparently Google is smart enough to know that something like "census day 1891" is some sort of British thing, though it doesn't mention that the England and Wales Census was the day before the Canadian version.

Google tells when was census day in 1790

Google is All About Books (and a few other things)

We started out with a single page on using Google for genealogy. That included a video and may be found here. Then we branched out and discussed using Google Books for genealogy. Now, we have what might be a continuing series on Genealogy and Google Books. Hence, this introduction which serves as a road map.

The first thing to recognize is that Google Books is only one of many sources of books online. Our post, here, discusses Google Books and compares it with some other major sources on online genealogy books. 

How To Find & Use Google Books For Genealogy Research

The following material has been abbreviated and edited from the original posting on Lisa Lisson’s blog ‘Are You My Cousin?’ Michael Dindinger thought people might benefit from another perspective and added detail to our original Genealogy Research Using Google Books.

Genealogy researchers love books. Lisa is no different, but know what she (and many others of us) love more? Free Books! It's time to start exploring Google Books!

Secrets of Printing from Google Books

You would think it would be pretty simple to print from Google Books. Simply right click on the page and then "print." Well, it really isn't that simple. Google, probably to better safeguard the various sources that allowed them to digitize books, doesn't print the page a researcher wants without a few tricks. Luckily, those tricks are not overly difficult and most anybody's computer will have the necessary capabilities.

Searching Books for Family History

Four major places (and there are many more, including Worldcat) you can search for genealogy books of interest at home FOR FREE include:

• Google Books - our series about Google Books starts here
• FamilySearch - Michael Dindinger often mentions FamilySearch in his Family History Learning Moments
• Archive dot org - our page about the Internet Archive is here
• HeritageQuest (home use requires a library card or subscription - see places here - including Timberland Libraries)

Michael Reads the Newspapers

by Michael W. Dindinger, via email on September 17, 2019

FAMILY HISTORY LEARNING MOMENT
Michael's main sources for this post:

The Family History Guide
FamilySearch Research Wiki

Since digitizing and storing thousands of images of newspaper pages on the Web is expensive, free online collectons of digitized historical newspapers are rare. However, modern day newspapers are increasingly found for free online. Free access to “historical’ databases can often be found at local libraries in larger communities.

Genealogy Research Using Google Books

I'm a big fan of Google Books. With a Google account, you can save Google ebooks to your library. The screenshot, above, shows what's currently in my own Google library. It is really pretty simple to use Google Books and you don't even to have a free account unless you want to keep stuff in the Google "cloud." Best of all, none of this takes up any storage space.

Using Google for Genealogy

The ubiquitous search engine of Google, while itself isn't a Genealogy tool, is extremely useful for genealogy research. The video, below, shows how you can use Google for genealogy web searching. Among other things, the narrator explains how to directly search genealogy sites such as FamilySearch using Google.