New Roots Resources

From Asia to Ireland, Britain to St. Louis and everywhere in between, look for these new CDs, Web sites and databases to help your genealogical cause:

• Origins.net recently added the Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills Index (1750 to 1800) to its subscription-only English records site at <www.englishorigins.com>. The index lists first and last name of the testator (the person who left the will), that person’s residence and the month and year when probate was granted, for more than 208,000 entries.

• The St. Louis Genealogical Society published a CD index of 488,000 St. Louis Catholic burial records (1780 to 2002). Visit <www.rootsweb.com/~mostlogs/STINDEX. HTM> for ordering information.

• Do you have ancestors who may have passed through the immigration stations in San Francisco and Honolulu between 1882 and 1955? A new online database from the University of California at Berkeley and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) lists arrivals from China, Japan, Korea, Burma, Hong Kong, Macao and other places. If you find your ancestor in the database, your next step should be to check the records at NARA’s San Bruno, Calif., facility. Search the database at <groups. haas.berkeley.edu/iber/casefiles>.

• Next time you visit your local library, ask if HeritageQuest Online is available. This new resource for genealogists was released to public libraries across the country this summer. It’s a comprehensive, Web-based genealogy resource developed specifically for library patrons. According to ProQuest, the new product combines primary source materials from UMI Genealogy & Local History Online and multiple resources from Heritage Quest (acquired by ProQuest last summer). You’ll be able to search US census data, banking and military records, obituaries and more than 24,000 family and local histories. Although ProQuest sells HeritageQuest Online access only to libraries, it has partnered with Genealogy.com to offer consumer subscriptions to the Family and Local Histories portion of the service at <www.genealogy.com>. Visit <www.proquest.com/umi/features/feature-02/defaultshtml> to find out more about this resource.

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently released an updated CD-ROM version of the Family History library (FHL) catalog. Although the catalog is available at the Family Search Web site <www.familysearch.org>, this new CD features more current catalog listings, plus keyword and title searches, which aren’t yet available online. Family-Search surfers will benefit from another FHL project: an online update to the International Genealogical Index (IGI), a database of various church-and vital-records extracts from around the world. The updated IGI includes new records — bringing its total to 1 billion — more flexible searching and links to records in the FHL catalog.

From the December 2002 issue of Family Tree Magazine