VISITING UTAH
If you have been watching Kenyatta Berry and Josh Taylor on
the Genealogy Roadshow on PBS stations, you may wonder how they find all those
original record images onscreen. Many family historians and probably one or two
archivists are unaware that many county courthouse records are available from
your home computer or mobile phone 24/7 and free-of-charge at FamilySearch.org
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| View of Summit County Execution Dockets and Fulton County Tax Records at the OGS Library |
The Genealogical Society of Utah was formed in 1894 and has
evolved into the modern FamilySearch, a nonprofit arm of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, with a wonderful mission statement, “believing
that families bring joy and meaning to life.”
[Ours is “to promote subject and special collections services.”]
Just some statistics…..
Launch date of FamilySearch was 24 May 1999. The web site currently has
85,000 unique visitors each day. They are adding 33 million digital images each
month. Somewhere in there are over 60,000 digital books. FamilySearch has over
a million registered users [you have to give them your email address and create
a user name/password to view the images]. They have had over 16.6 billion page
views since inception.
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Interior of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City
taken in 2006
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In very simplified terms, the Mormons believe in saving
their ancestors, thus the dedication to genealogy. They went from courthouse to
courthouse microfilming records in the 1960s and 70s and have volunteers
(missionaries) throughout the world scanning records today. There are 200
digital camera teams set up in 45 countries, with 42 of them right here in the
United States. We have a couple here at the Ohio Genealogical Society library
scanning Ohio obituaries. Last week, despite all the snow, they were able
produce 13,349 images. They have nearly passed the 600,000 mark, and they have
just begun the letter “T”. “They” refers to Al and Julia Hoffman, local church
members who were trained by a team from Salt Lake. The two are volunteers,
working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, zapping pictures of Ohio obituaries. Before retirement, Al used to be our postal
mail carrier so he was used to seeing our library each day. He just lives here
now like the rest of us!
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Al and Julia Hoffman Scanning Ohio Obituaries for
FamilySearch at the OGS Library
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These digital camera teams and over 200,000 genealogy
volunteers at home, who are indexing images, have produced 1363 separate
searchable record collections online. But the real treasure is all those
courthouse volumes and case file packets that I mentioned earlier. They are
still waiting to be indexed, yet the casual user can access them in about 60
seconds.
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Richland County Common Pleas Case Files at the OGS
Library – Waiting Since the 1830s to be Processed – but Real Treasures Inside
that didn’t make the History Books!
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After getting a user name/password, log in at www.familysearch.org, and choose
“Search”. Despite the name, don’t try searching. Instead, click on the image of
the United States on the map to the right. Select “Ohio” from the menu, then
click on “Start Researching in Ohio”. Then click on “Show all 58 Collections”.
Web designers like to throw in a dozen extra steps, don’t they? Way at the
bottom is a section of “Image Only Historical Records”, i.e., not searchable.
As an example, under “Probate & Court”, choose “Ohio Probate Records 1789-1996”.
There are almost 7 million images here! Click on the Browse line and then
choose a county. Pick a record type and go into a volume. You’ll see
administrations, guardianships, probate journals, and wills. Each of these
files corresponds to those large ledgers that you would pull down and examine
in the Probate office at the courthouse.
Once you are in an actual volume of records, I generally
type the number “10” in the image box at the top and click “Go”. Hopefully,
this will put you in the middle of an original index at the front of the
ledger. Then it is just a matter of estimating the page number to find the
action you are seeking because the image page numbers do not correspond with
the ledger page numbers. Often there are two pages shown in an image. The user
can enlarge the page with the + (plus) sign and then page forward or backward
using the arrows on either side of the image number box. Depending on your
Internet connection, pages may be a little slow to load. You can print directly
from the screen (will print what is in view), but I like to download the file
into an image program like Picasa.com (free download). Then I can crop what I
want and add the label desired.
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Picture of the Temple at Salt Lake City that I took in
2006 from the top floor of the old Hotel Utah now Joseph Smith Building next
door
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When you are done exploring Ohio’s records as well as those
of your favorite foreign country, go back to the beginning and try an ancestral
name in the search box that we ignored earlier. You might stumble upon
something new and be as happy as our ex-mailman pressing a button all day, or
as those “random” case study subjects on Genealogy Roadshow!
Tom Neel, Library Director
Ohio Genealogical Society
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