Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Looking for surname books in Virginia just got easier

Quoting from Nathan W. Murphy's article "Has Anyone Studied My Virginia Genealogy?"
A new guide on FamilySearch Wiki can help you discover if anyone has studied your Virginia genealogy. You can’t trust every word of published family histories, but they generally help you save a lot of time and hard work. They may contain photographs, old letters, and family documents that you normally do not encounter in typical family history searches. Well-sourced family histories can help you quickly trace your family back several generations.
 Essentially what Nathan and the others writing for the FamilySearch Research Wiki have done is to link every surname book or article they could find online to the Research Wiki organized by county in Virginia. Can you imagine the amount of work this took to do? Can you imagine multiplying this by hundreds and thousands of articles in the Research Wiki? The amount of organized information pouring into the Research Wiki is truly phenomenal.

You should go to the newly designed startup page for the Research Wiki and take a look around. This is not your beginners guide to genealogy, the amount of information that has been added to this resource is so broad that expert Research Consultants at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City are using the Research Wiki to help patrons at the Library. Why wait to go to the Family History Library so one of the Consultants can show you where the information is found in the Research Wiki. Why not look for yourself. Maybe then you become the expert?

I am serious about Research Consultants using the Research Wiki. Actually, many of the articles have been written by Family History Library Staff members and other extremely knowledgeable genealogists. If you want to know where I go to share my experience, I write articles for the Research Wiki. So far I have 2,683 edits in the Research Wiki. Not bragging, simply illustrating that some of us are contributing to the Research Wiki on a regular basis. Some of the contributors have edits into the tens of thousands.

The first page of the Research Wiki should have a big sign that says: "Start all genealogical research here."

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