NGS Library Moving to St. Louis

Once available only to National Genealogical Society members, the society’s 20,000-volume circulating collection will soon be open to all. The Washington, DC-based NGS has closed its library in order to move most of the books to their new home: the St Louis County Library. In a new “strategic partnership,” the NGS library collection will be treated as a special collection of the St. Louis library. The books will be available in January for on-site use, and by February, the entire collection will be accessible through inter library loan. See <www.ngsgenealogy.org> to learn more.

Search engines come a dime a dozen, but genealogy-specific ones aren’t so common. That’s why the new search engine from GeneaNet <www.geneanet.org> is a welcome addition to the online genealogist’s toolkit. GeneaSeek <www.geneaseek.org> indexes Web sites related to genealogy only and searches all their pages for the words or phrases you plug in. On the results page, you’ll see the word you’re looking for in the context of the page. And in case a page is temporarily unavailable, you can check the cached (stored) version. So far, you can search 3.4 million pages. Submit your own genealogy site to be indexed at <www.geneaseek.org/en/add_url.php>. Learn more about GeneaNet’s other helpful tools and resources in the August 2001 Family Tree Magazine.

The mega-free genealogy site RootsWeb and its commercial sister site Ancestry are pulling their family tree databases together, just a few months after doing the same with their message boards. RootsWeb’s WorldConnect and Ancestry World Tree have become one integrated database of user-contributed family history information containing 150 million-plus names. The site’s owner, MyFamily.com, promises to keep this database free and to refrain from selling contributed information on CD-ROMs or elsewhere.

The new database incorporates WorldConnect features such as descendancy, register and ahnentafel reports, and “Post-em” notes that allow users to comment on the data. Search the combined databases via RootsWeb <worldconnect.rootsweb.com> or Ancestry <www.ancestry.com/share/awt/main.htm>.

From the February 2002 issue of Family Tree Magazine