Digital book operations manager Dennis Meldrum says approximately 17,700 books were moved, and a backlog of 13,300 books—which wouldn't fit onto the BYU site—were added.

That means you can now search upwards of 31,000 family history books at FamilySearch.org. Another 4,500 will be added this week, with 25,000 more to come during 2012.

You can keyword-search the entire text of the books and download an entire book (instead of one page at a time, as was the case on the BYU site). "We are working to improve the download experience over the coming weeks," Meldrum says.

We're joining in the RootsTech excitement with conference specials for everyone! You'll get 20 percent off select online genealogy titles at ShopFamilyTree.com.

Thursday, February 02, 2012 9:07:14 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

We've got you covered with 12 great titles for just $12 each! Choose from:

• 101 Brick Wall Busters: Solutions to Overcome Your Genealogical Challenges book
  
  
• Remember That? A Year-by-Year Chronicle of Fun Facts, Headlines, & Your Memories book (which I think would be great for the person who doesn't need another pair of slippers, but would love if you bring a baked treat, sit for a spell, and go through this book together and reminisce)
  
  
• Family History Detective: A Step-by-Step Guide to Investigating Your Family History book (terrific for someone who wants to start on his or her genealogy)
  
  
• Family Tree Magazine 2011 Annual CD (update your digital Family Tree Magazine library)
  
  
• Family Tree Pocket Reference book
  
  
• Genealogist's Research Trip Planner digital download (I will be consulting this guide to plan my research in Cleveland this April, which will piggyback on a trip to the Ohio Genealogical Society conference April 12-14)
  
  
• German Newspapers in America video class
  
  
• International Genealogy Passport CD
  
  
• Irish Genealogy Online video class
  
  
• Military Research Guide CD (another good gift for a beginner, or for anyone tracing a Civil War, WWII or other military ancestor)
  
  
• Photo Rescue digital download (wonderful for the keeper of your family's photographic heritage)

Get more details on each 12 for $12 goodie on ShopFamilyTree.com.

Monday, December 12, 2011 11:16:34 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Our free 60-minute webinar Start Writing Your Life Stories with Sunny Jane Morton, author of the book My Life & Times: A Guided Journal For Collecting Your Stories, takes place Thursday, Oct. 13 at 1 pm Eastern Time (noon CT, 11 am MT, 10 am PT).
  

Sunny will share tips and ideas for capturing the stories of a lifetime—your own or those of a loved one. Click here to sign up for this webinar. 

• Update: Our free webinar, Be a Family History Detective: Secrets to Starting Your Genealogy, with Desmond Walls Allen, author of the book Family History Detective, is scheduled for Oct. 26 at 1 pm Eastern Time (noon CT, 11 am MT, 10 am PT). 

Allen will share essential advice for getting your family history search off the ground. Click here to sign up.

Tuesday, October 04, 2011 4:26:31 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

Here’s what’s on tap for this edition:

• tips for searching online newspaper collections
  
• what PERSI is and why you should use it
  
• finding historical books on the web
  
• News From the Blogosphere

New to podcasts? Cooke explains here what podcasts are and how to use them. 

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Wednesday, September 28, 2011 8:54:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

Wondering what hot topics your grandparents discussed with the neighbors, or what tunes your mom whistled as a teen? Want to flesh out your family's story with facts about everyday life? Enjoy reminiscing about days gone by?

Our book Remember That? A Year-by-Year Chronicle of Fun Facts, Headlines and Your Memories, by Allison Dolan and the editors of Family Tree Magazine, is an accounting of the whos, whats, whens and wheres of the 20th century:

• In 1930, the average annual income was $1,612, milk cost 65 cents a gallon and a home cost $7,146.
  
• In 1938, a devastating hurricane hit the Northeast coast.
  
• Sales of women's trousers skyrocketed in 1942.
  
• Perry Como crooned “Some Enchanted Evening” in 1949.
  
• Special K cereal and Crest toothpaste hit shelves in 1955.
  
• The FCC chairman called TV a “vast wasteland” in 1961. 

The facts keep coming for each year from 1930 all the way through 2010, categorized into top headlines, prices, government affairs, new products, pop culture phenomena, hit music, popular TV shows and more. It also has pages where you can record your own family milestones and favorites.

You also can download our free "My Life In ..." form from our website that lets you describe your own favorites—clothes, hair, music and more—from three big years in your life (you’ll need to enter your name and e-mail address to access the form). 

Click here to learn more about the book Remember That?.

Thursday, September 15, 2011 9:38:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• FamilySearch’s Dennis Meldrum gave me a demo of the soon-to-be-launched new Family History Archives website.

The Family History Archives, now hosted on the Brigham Young university libraries site, lets you search the text of nearly 18,000 family and local history books. But the collection is outgrowing the BYU site, and a backlog of digitized books are waiting to be put online. 

The new site will launch in about a month and a half, says Meldrum, with around 45,000 books from the Family History Library and a half-dozen other libraries. You already can try out the new site in beta at FamilySearch Labs. 

The new search has one field where you enter a name, subject, author, keyword or any combination of these. You’ll download the entire book that matches your search results, then you can use a PDF viewer for finding your search terms within the book.

• If you’re researching ancestors in Sweden, you’ll want to explore a site called Lantmäteriet.se. This free site from the Swedish land registration authority (comparable to the US Bureau of Land Management General Land Office) has digitized historical maps and property records, for a total of 3 million maps and 70 million pages of text from the years 1628 to 1927.
  

I got just a quick demo of this site, but it’s one you could spend a lot of time on. You search by county, municipality and place, and get back maps and records for that place. (The advanced search lets you add more parameters, such as dates.) You’ll need the free DjVu plugin to view the maps. You can click Buy to order a download of the map.

There’s an English version of the maps search, but I found I had to use Google translation tools to read the information about the collection. 

Thursday, September 08, 2011 11:06:56 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

So in the interest of fairness this Father’s Day, Sunday, June 19, I browsed around for some ideas for a dad who likes family history. (I’m dying to include what my little Leo is giving his daddy, but I’m afraid of spoiling his surprise, so I’ll show and tell after Sunday.)

• A framed picture of dad with his kids or grandkids, or dad as a youngster with his dad, is a classic. Or I’ve heard about moms taking pictures of the wee ones wearing dad’s or grandpa’s shoes, tie and hat, and adding a frame. 

• If you’ve been doing genealogy research, put together some of the items you’ve found into an album (here are some ideas), or burn a CD.

• Finally have those old home movies transferred from reels or VHS tapes onto DVDs (get tips here), or scan his old vacation photos or slides and put them on CDs.
  

• If your dad is an old school, stoic kind of dad, and you want to get to know him better, get Questions to Bring You Closer to Dad: 100+ Conversation Starts for Fathers and Children of Any Age by Stuart Gustafson and Robyn Freedman Spizman for yourself. Then, treat Dad to a day of bonding.

• Lots of dads are military history buffs, so something from our Civil War Anniversary category would be just the thing. 

• Our Military Research Guide CD (that’s my grandpa’s WWII portrait on the case) or our on-demand webinar Online Military Records: Document Your Family's Service, presented by David A. Fryxell  would help him find his ancestors’ military records.
  

• A few years ago on a road trip, my parents and I enjoyed listening to the War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars audio book, edited by Andrew Carroll and read by familiar voices such as Tom Brokaw and Joan Allen. 

• If your dad likes to go exploring, ShopFamilyTree.com has travel books such as Georgia's Lighthouses and Historic Coastal Sites and Oregon Impressions. Just choose the state you want here, then click the subcategory Travel. 
  
  
• Help make a new dad’s life a little easier—so he'll have a little time for genealogy—with 50 Tips and Tricks for New Dads by Vincent Iannelli, MD
  

Monday, June 13, 2011 5:03:57 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

One of the patients was 18-year-old James E. Hanger, who lost his leg. After returning home, he crafted an artificial leg from barrel staves with a hinge at the knee. He was commissioned to manufacture prosthetic limbs for other wounded soldiers and patented his device. He founded what is now the Hanger Orthopedic Group, still a leading manufacturer of artificial limbs.

Friday, June 03, 2011 9:52:20 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

Thanks everyone for telling us about your Civil War ancestors as part of this giveaway—we've enjoyed reading your stories!

There’ll be many opportunities to learn more about your family's experiences as the Civil War sesquicentennial commemoration continues. We’re looking forward to sharing them with you.

Friday, April 29, 2011 3:20:42 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Submissions should be between 1,000 and 2,000 words.
• Essays should tell the story of a real tradition, including:

• What is the tradition?
• Who started it and when?
• What cultural or regional background does the dish or tradition represent? (for example, is it a US regional specialty or a product of your ancestry in Germany, Sweden, Mexico, etc.?)
• What does the tradition mean to you and your family?

• Submissions should include the recipe described in the story and a family photo—of the original chef, people described in the story or yourself. (Pictures of the dish itself may be submitted but likely will not be published.)

• Essays must be in Microsoft Word (.DOC or .RTF) or plain-text format (.TXT). Do not paste your essay into the body of the email.
• Photos must be in JPG or TIFF format, with a resolution of 300 dpi or higher.
• Your name, mailing address, phone number and email address must be included in the email message and the essay document.

Monday, April 04, 2011 12:59:36 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [7]

Canadian author and genealogist Dave Obee recently opined on his Facebook page, “I've been hearing about the pending death of the book for several years now. One of these days, the prediction might turn out to be true.”

Obee’s comment kicked off an interesting online conversation. For many genealogists, the surge in online books can sound like a threat to the paper tome. But, as with all things, the market drives business and innovation, and the convenience and flexibility of digital books is very appealing. Here are some Tech Tips to help you dive in and reap the benefits of this growing phenomenon:

Get Started
Allison Stacy, editor of Family Tree Magazine, made this great video for getting started with Google Books.

See How Other Genealogists Use Google Books
Miriam Robbins Midkiff, author of the popular genealogy blog AnceStories: The Story of My Ancestors was featured in this video produced by Google.

Search Within a Book
After conducting your initial search and selecting a particular book, you can search within that book by simply typing specific keywords in the search box found in the column on the left side of the book’s page. This box searches only the book currently being viewed and makes quick work of finding a desired surname on individual pages of a large volume. (Find this tip in my new book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox.)

Keep Up To Date
The Inside Google Books blog is a great way to keep up to date on the latest news at Google Books. Add the RSS feed to your iGoogle page or favorite reader by simply clicking the Feedburner button found in the column on the right.

Google eBooks
Have you noticed that the Google Books homepage looks different these days? That’s because they have introduced the Google eBookstore to the offering. Here’s a terrific little video that explains the benefits of online books in a fun and simple way:

Google eBooks
Don’t skip Google eBooks just because they offer books for sale. Try this handy tip to unearth free gems:

1. Go to Google Books.
2. Click blue Go to the Google eBookstore Now button
3. Type family history in the search box and click the Search All Google eBooks button.
4. Click the Free Only link in the light blue box at the top of the page.
5. You’ll get a results list full of free books, many hard to find self-published family histories.

Look Elsewhere
When it comes to digital family history books, Google Books isn’t the only game in town Check out the Family History Archive, then watch the video below to learn more about how to use this robust resource.

I've had such a great time sharing Tech Tips with you these last 2 months. Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll join me at the free Family Tree Magazine podcast and Genealogy Gems podcast for more lively conversation about genealogy!

—Lisa Louise Cooke

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 9:12:39 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

The other day I was flipping through TV channels when I stumbled upon the reality TV show “Gold Rush Alaska.” As I got lured into watching a couple of episodes (they were running a marathon that day), it all looked very familiar:

Huge excavators were pulling up great bucketfuls of material from the ground. The huge volume of earth would then tumble its way down sifting machines, eventually run across a wave table. The ultimate goal was to sift out the gold nuggets.

Then it hit me: That’s what we do with Google!

Yes, more than once after doing a simple search I have felt like a huge bucket full of earth had been dropped on me. I would stare at the hundreds of thousands of results and wonder, “How am I ever going to sift through all this to find my genealogy gems?” (This concept goes right back to the early days when I began the Genealogy Gems Podcast in 2007. My first gem was on Google, and I have frequently featured the search powerhouse on the show ever since.)

On the show, newbie miners were struggling to figure out which specialized tools they needed to sift immense quantities of dirt and rocks down to the type of material that carries the gold -- the fine black dirt. Then they had to use another set of unique tools to sift the fine black dirt in hopes of finding gold nuggets.

So what are the right tools for the job of sifting through the seemingly endless material on the Internet? And how do we get that unwanted material out of the way so we can get down to the good stuff where our genealogy gems may be hidden?

In the first installment of this Tech Tips Blog Series I shared with you one of my favorite “sifters” –- the dot dot dot (…) technique. But that is just one of a cache of search sifting tools -- known in the search world as operators -- available to family history researchers. Let me share a few more favorites from my new book The Genealogist's Google Toolbox (Genealogy Gems Publications)

Understand the underlying concept: Search is art, not a science!
While search operators behave scientifically and logically, we must construct our search queries artfully. Sometimes it’s what you add in, and sometimes it’s what you leave out, that determines the quality of your results.

Exact phrase sifter
When you want to find an exact phrase in a website, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. For example, “U.S. federal census” will bring up websites with that exact phrase and eliminate all other variations.

Words apart search
While quotation marks can help you zero in, in some cases they may actually prevent the ideal results. (There’s that “art” thing again.)

We have to keep in mind that sometimes the words that we are looking for won’t appear next to each other even though they normally do. For example, you may be looking for a city directory, and normally you would expect to see the two words together as a phrase: city directory. But by using an asterisk to set them apart, you may find the perfect result that searching for them together may have missed.

city * directory

Results could include:

city phone directory

city telephone directory

city and county directory

Related Search
For this little gem, watch my video from the Genealogy Gems YouTube Channel.

I hope these gems bring you a family history strike! Good luck!

Monday, March 14, 2011 11:24:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

We’ve added on to our ShopFamilyTree.com genealogy store! You’ll now find many more how-to, reference and other helpful genealogy books.

My favorite way to find stuff I need is to type the name of a place (such as a state or country) or research topic (such as military or photos) into the keyword search box in the top left corner of the store.

If you’re a VIP member, remember to log in (click My Account at the very top of the page) for your 10 percent discount.

Here’s a sampling of what’s new:

• Bibliographies and indexes: Just two examples of the kinds of books you’ll find in here are New Mexico: A Biographical Dictionary and The Life of Thomas Johnson: Member of the Continental Congress, First Governor of Maryland (and the book title goes on—this was an important guy)  

• Heraldry: Learn about armigerous ancestors in book such as English Surnames: An Essay on Family Nomenclature, Historical, Etymological, and Humorous 

• Naming: Find titles on first and last names, such as Scottish Forenames.

• US State Research Guides: Click a state for a list of our familiar State Research Guides, plus new products related to research in that state.

• International Research Guides: Look under Subcategories and choose a world region.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 1:48:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

I came across an article about a book you might be interested in, especially if your ancestors were African slaves or involved in the slave trade.

Between 1492 and about 1820, four enslaved Africans left the Old World for every European migrant. According to Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by David Eltis and David Richardson, we know more about this forced migration than about European migration during the time. That’s because the slave trade generated profits, which usually meant record-keeping.

The book is based in part on the data in the online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which Eltis co-edited, containing information on 35,000 slave voyages from Africa to the Americas. (Read our post about the database's online debut in 2008.)

Detailed maps in the book show how almost every port in the Atlantic world at the time organized and sent out a slave voyage. Almost half of those voyages came from ports in the Americas.

The data let the authors determine trading patterns, for example, the United States drew more slaves from the area of Senegambia south to Liberia (on Africa’s west coast) than did any other part of the Americas. The authors also found the slave trade was going strong at the time it was finally suppressed.

The book also gives you a more personal look at the trade with information about people and conditions on board the ships, as well as writings from and images of a few passengers. You can read more about it in the article here, and find it listed on Amazon.com here. 

For help researching African-American roots, see the articles in our online toolkit. Find eight steps to get started tracing slave ancestors here.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011 1:07:12 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

On the sixth day of Christmas, my genea-Santa gave to me … The Family Tree Sourcebook: The Essential Directory of American County and Town Resources.

You’ll also find a how-to article and books, organizations and websites for each state, as well as a listing of national genealogical sites and organizations.

And, the book comes with a month of searchable online access through a Family Tree Magazine Plus membership.

Click here to get yourself a copy of The Family Tree Sourcebook (on sale now at 33 percent off!).

Saturday, December 18, 2010 6:19:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

The book Family Tree Legacies: Preserving Memories Throughout Time is great for beginners, newlyweds or anyone who’s ready to create a lasting family keepsake from their genealogy information. You can get a good look at what’s inside the book in this blog post. 

It comes with how-to information and pages for recording family information of all kinds, plus a CD so you can print extras. You can download the Military Service Record, for writing about ancestors who served their country, as a free PDF from FamilyTreeMagazine.com. 

Click here to order Family Tree Legacies from ShopFamilyTree.com. 

Thursday, December 16, 2010 4:26:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• The Organized Genealogy Bundle: Organize Your Genealogy Life! CD, Organization Made Easy webinar recording, Organize Now! book, 2010 Family Tree Magazine Desktop Calendar

• The Beginner Genealogist’s Bundle: Family Tree Essentials CD, Beginner's Guide to Genealogy Download, and a one-year subscription to Family Tree Magazine

• The Family Legacy Preservation Bundle: Family Tree Legacies book, Heirloom Preservation Made Easy webinar recording, Family Photo Essentials CD

Wednesday, March 03, 2010 4:40:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]