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Thursday, October 15, 2009

Internet Genealogy and WorldCat

Thursday, August 17th, 2006


Barb Poole has written another article for today’s Blog. Someday Barb and I will have to actually meet each other! Here’s Barb’s GuestBlog:   (Note:  Steve and I have met twice.)


I wrote a piece about a new genealogy magazine in Steve’s blog of May 20th, in which I wrote, “A new genealogy magazine has arrived on the scene; it is Internet Genealogy and can be ordered as a hard copy or downloaded from the internet (different prices for each). To order go to http://www.internet-genealogy.com/ and you can see the specifics as well as download a preview issue.” This is an update, which may be beneficial to some, whether you subscribe or not. The editor/publisher of that magazine asked for suggestions from the subscribers as to what they wanted in the magazine.


One suggestion was to have all the websites listed in that issue of the magazine to be on one page, so you could go to that page and see all the links listed, and not look all around for them. However, the magazine went one step further and now has on their website all the links that were mentioned in that particular issue. If you go to the site listed above, you will see a section listing the links for each magazine (both past and current issues) and the link will take you to that webpage. No more typing out the addresses. And, these sites give you an idea of what the magazine has covered thus far. In addition, if the links change, the company will change them as well on their homepage. So far, there is a pretty impressive list of genealogy sites.


My second recent find is a site called WorldCat, which I got from a message board, out of Canada. It is the first I have heard of it, but is a site I will use many times over. This is what I received, ” Google is easily accessed, but WorldCat’s locations of 1.3 billion items in 10,000 libraries around the world previously have been available only through institutional access. It’s become available to the public here and now. It’s FREE and simple to use. Just type in a book name or author and it shows which library holds that book. Just go to: http://www.worldcat.org/ .”


On a personal note, I put in titles of three books and not only did they appear, but it gave the name of the library and the distance from where I live (Massachusetts). For an example, I put in the book title New England Marriages prior to 1700 and there were 381 hits. The closest library that has the book is the library in Lexington, 13 miles away, and the furthest is Alaska, all of 3,349 miles away from me! With this information, you can either go to or contact that library or see if you can get it through the inter-library loan process.