The ROOTS-L Library

    If you're just starting out...

  • Beginning Genealogy: Information that's especially useful when you're getting started, but of interest even after you've been at it for years.

  • Family History Centers: It's certainly possible to do genealogy without ever setting foot inside a Family History Center (FHC). But if you live close enough to visit one, you really should. The resources may not initially wow you, but you have access through each FHC to most of the resources available at the Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City, and those resources are awesome indeed. ROOTS-L has several files about FHCs and the FHL, explaining what they are, where they can be found, how they can best be utilized, etc.

  • Terms and definitions: What is an ahnentafel? A Tiny Tafel? What was the funny disease Grandpa died from? What do people mean when they say 2nd cousin twice removed? Here are some files that define terms used by genealogists.

    More specialized resources

  • Specific Ethnic, Religious, or Social groups: For these groups, there are sometimes special resources and research techniques that prove useful. These files discuss the tools and techniques for researching some specific ethnic, religious, and social groups, such as Jewish and Cherokee ancestry, Quakers, and the Masons.

  • Historical Names and Families: Are you connected to Royalty or Admiral Dewey? The Ball family of Virginia? Maybe George Bush? There are files about these and other historical names in our collection.

  • Members of Historical Groups: Besides the files about individuals and families mentioned above, we also have files with the names of people belonging to interesting groups, such as the men who fought at the Alamo, Irish immigrants to Canada, German immigrants to the Ohio valley, gunfighters of the Old (American) West, and more...

  • American Civil War: There is also much material relating to the American Civil War. See also the American Civil War Homepage.

    Internet Resources, Genealogical and General

  • Information about using ROOTS-L: How to subscribe, access files, etc.

  • Genealogical resources on the Internet: Several files about Library catalogs online, FTP sites, GENSERV, MELVYL and more, giving an overview of a variety of genealogical resources on the Internet.

  • General resources on the Internet: Useful as you wander about the Internet, we have information about gopher, the SimTel archives, compression software, FTP, and other tools and techniques and resources you'll want to know about.

    Regional Resources

    Most of our files fall into the category of regional material: where are the Family History Centers located? What books are there in the Library of Congress? How does on obtain vital records? But pointers to other interesting files and sites are also often included.

    Genealogy on your Computer

  • Software reviews: Reviews of genealogy software from computers from Amiga to Unix to Windows; plus a Fortran program for matching Tiny Tafels and the Tiny Tafel spec.
  • genealog.faceofg: Computers: Changing the Face of Genealogy, 1989, Richard Pence. An overview, still timely, of how computers have changed how we do genealog y. Includes explanations of tiny tafels and BBSes and other computer-related terms.
  • Genealogy on the various commercial services: Information about genealogy on GEnie, CompuServe, Prodigy, and others.
  • Forms to print or fill out: Circular charts and an extraction form for the 1920 census.
  • Additional Computer Related Resources: Computer hardware, dial-up libraries, information about modems, and other odds and ends...

    Dates and Calendars

  • genealog.dateday: A collection of three charts which can be used to convert a specific date into a day of the week. (Gotta build a cgi-bin script to do this someday!) These charts cover dates between 1753 and 2008.
  • genealog.perpcal: Is the date of interest in the 1800s or 1900s? This file contains a Gregorian or New Style calendar for each month in that period. A less compact but perhaps easier to follow system than that in genealog.dateday above.
  • genealog.perpcal2: More compact (all on one page!) but maybe more confusing than the two approaches above, here is yet another Perpetual Calendar.
  • genealog.quakerc1:: A table prepared by Barbara Tysinger to help associate months referred to using the Quaker custom ("10th Month" etc) to the standard names such as October or December.
  • See also birthdate calculator

    Miscellaneous

    A regular potpourri -- information about preserving photographs, the ISO Country Codes, poetry -- stuff I'm baffled so far as to where it logically belongs. :-)

    Return to ROOTS-L Resources Page.


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    Most recent update: Sunday, 04-Mar-2001 15:51:51 MST
    Copyright © 2001-2003 Karen E. Isaacson, karen@mtpinos.com