Author: Rick Crume

Toolkit Quick Hits: Family and Local History Books Premium

Before you trek to a library to find A Commemorative History of Antelope County, Nebraska or Descendants of Floyd Floosickle, 1750-1920, try tapping these online collections of digitized local and family history books—you can search thousands of tomes simultaneously and even save copies to your computer. Be sure to take advantage of the advanced search features noted below, such as wildcards to find spelling variations of names (Rob?son finds Robison and Robeson; Rob*son finds Robison, Robeson, Robinson and Robertson) and exact-phrase searching to find a full name (enclose it in quotation marks). But don’t rely entirely on the search engine; browse the tables of contents and indexes of promising books, too. To locate other online histories, check USGenWeb’s county pages, the Online Books Page and the Internet Archive.

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Obituary Finders Premium

Instead of borrowing microfilmed newspapers on interlibrary loan, you now can access many obituaries online—these are some of the largest databases and indexes.

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Family Historian 3.1 Premium

The Basics Price: $49.99 at Target (but not online at <www.target.com>), and $69.99 at Fry’s and Micro Center. Version 4 was slated for release in February 2009. Purchasers of version 3.1 on or after Nov. 26, 2008, qualify for a free upgrade. ...

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