Oct
14
2007
Books We Own: Using Other People’s Personal Libraries to Find Your
Family
By Jana Lloyd
Sometimes, amid all the links on RootsWeb’s homepage, useful resources get lost. We continually tout the advantages of adding your family tree to WorldConnect, posting queries about your family on message boards, or joining a mailing list to keep updated on an area, name, or topic of interest to you. But what about some of the other resources available on
RootsWeb?
This week, I’d like to highlight a very useful, but often overlooked resource on RootsWeb: “Books We Own.”
What Is “Books We Own?”
Simply put, Books We Own is a list of genealogical books owned by different volunteers who are willing to do look-ups. 1,500 volunteers contribute to the project, and all are willing to look up genealogical information in one or more of their family history books.
More than 1,000 surnames are represented in the books, which include family histories, town and county histories, atlases, gazetteers, directories, and more. There are books on the U.S., multiple Canadian provinces, and forty-nine other countries.
How Do I Find Out Whether There Is a Book of Interest to Me?
To find out if there is a book that might have details you’re looking for about your family, click on the “Books We Own” link under “Hosted Volunteer Projects” on the RootsWeb homepage; or, go here: http://www.rootsweb.com/~bwo/
Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see a search box and a Master Index. Enter a term you are looking for or browse through the index. It is divided into regions and other categories. To find a book on a particular surname, click the “Family Genealogies” link.
How Do I Request a Look Up?
If you find a book of interest to you, request a look-up by clicking on the link at the end of the book citation.
A form will appear where you can fill out your information, the name of the book, the surname(s) you want looked up, and any additional information that will help the volunteer in his/her search. Some but not all volunteers will provide photocopies or scans of pages. If this is the case, you will need to reimburse the volunteer for the cost of
copies and postage.
A useful request will include the name of the book you want a look-up performed in, full names of the people you are looking up information for, relevant dates, and any other information that may help the volunteer distinguish your ancestor from someone else. A good sample request, taken from the “Helpful Tips” section of the site, looks like
this:
Subject: BWO Look-up of Fingerhut in Ohio
Please look in your books Early History of Coshocton County, Ohio and Cemeteries of Paulding County, Ohio for John, James, Sarah and Lucinda Fingerhut who lived in Coshocton County from 1820-1850 and Paulding County from 1850-1900.
Here are a list of other helpful tips for effectively filling out a request form: http://www.rootsweb.com/~bwo/tips.html
Have a Book You Want to Contribute?
If you have a book you think would be of value to others, and you would be willing to volunteer your time to do look-up requests, you can register to become a volunteer for “Books We Own” by going to the contributor’s page: http://www.rootsweb.com/~bwo/contrib2.html
Make sure to read all the instructions for contributors. You will want to pay special attention to the copyright laws. If your book was published before 1923 you can freely transcribe or photocopy from it. If it was published after 1923, you will only be able to say whether you found an individual in the book and provide brief excerpts of it, unless you have permission from the author or publisher or the book contains a copyright-waiver clause.
And the Moral of the Story Is. . .
“Books We Own” is one of many great services provided by RootsWeb volunteers. It breaks down research barriers and allows us all to enlarge our genealogical libraries. Take a few minutes to browse the library of available books and see if any are of interest to you; or, choose to give back by listing your own book and making your resources available to us all.
Previously published in RootsWeb Review: 26 September 2007, Vol. 10, No. 39
