On Thursday, June 11^th, members of the Mesquite Historical and Genealogical Society benefited from Sherry Johnson’s insight on finding research sources on Google Books, World Cat, and Brigham Young University. Sherry, librarian and genealogist, showed members how to search several online collections to find their family history data. She pointed out that an ever increasing number of university and city libraries are allowing their collections of out-of-print and public domain books to be digitized and placed on the Internet, some in full text, searchable, and often available for download to your computer.

Google Books will allow a person to create an personal electronic bookshelf in a free Google account when the full text is available to the public. If a book is not in the public domain, a person may have to pay a small fee for the download. Go to http://www.google.com/ look under the “More” link for “Books” to begin your adventure. Google’s goal is to scan every book and make the full text searchable. What an exciting concept for genealogists!

Also, World Cat at http://www.worldcat.org/ allows the searcher to put in their zip code to discover which libraries in your area have a promising book which you discover by reading an online snippet. Create a free account and enjoy your search. Helpful books may be on the shelves of libraries close to your house.

Sherry notes that it is so nice to conduct this much research from home dressed in your casual clothes and bunny slippers. With the price of gasoline, you do not have to travel either long or short distances to search so many books and archives.