A new digital history project will make thousands of published family histories, city and county histories, historic city directories and related records available on the internet. Contributing to this project are the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana; the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU; and the Family History Library in Salt Lake. These libraries have the largest collections of city and county histories in North America.
Available with free access at http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/ , the collections will have "every word" search capability, which allows users to search by name, location, date, or other fields across the collection. The results are then linked to high quality digital images of the original publication.
I tried a search for a book title we have here "History of Abraham Hunsaker and his family" and was rewarded with a link to an exact copy of the book. I could read it page by page with the same text and illustrations as the book in my hand. A great bonus was another link to Kinkos so I could actually have the book printed, bound, and sent to me if I wanted to! How exciting!
We have never had enough room to shelve many of the family histories people have donated to us in the past. We've given many of these to the local family history center so people researching their ancestors would have access to them there. Now we'll have access to published family histories without the space issue. It will also be great if we can get into old city directories because many people come searching for those, wanting to know where someone lived years ago and they're disappointed because we no longer have the directories. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see those on the site at this time.
Susan
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