Community Update

Each year the Secretary of State and State Librarian Jesse White and the Illinois State Library offer temporary access to a set of electronic resources and databases. Anyone who is a staff member or user of an ILLINET member library (which includes our Geneva Library) can sign up and be approved for access by visiting http://www.finditillinois.org/tryit/ and requesting a login and password.  I can’t begin to tell you the enormous amount of information that you will find once you log in. There are all types of digital media covering topics such as digital literacy, general references, science and technology, geography, government and politics, health, news, and religion. The great thing about all this for genealogists is that you will also find many resources covering genealogy and family history.

Below are just a couple of the resources you can find and access through the Try-It! Illinois site:

Gale Genealogy Connect - this site has online books offering assistance and guidance for genealogical research. It also has several online registers with names of people who served in specific wars or regiments or who lived in certain colonial communities.

ProQuest - this company offers numerous resources for genealogy including obituaries, newspaper archives, Sanborn Maps,  biographies, and heritage books.

This is my first time discovering this resource so at this point I can’t offer much more advice about it other than to make sure you sign up yourself! It is definitely a valuable opportunity for anyone interested in learning more about history and genealogy. The access is only from October 1 through November 30 so the sooner you get signed up the more time you’ll have to explore it all. Also, I want to point out I only found out about this by being a member of the Fox Valley Genealogical Society which shows how important those memberships can be.