ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” talked about the somewhat lost art of repository research in the days when digital is all the rage.

What got me wistful was an upcoming invitation to speak at the monthly meeting of the Blair County Genealogical Society in Hollidaysburg on Oct. 15 on “Exploring Pennsylvania’s State Archives and Library.”

As I noted in the column last week, the proliferation of online sources available from the home desktop computer (or other device, can you tell how old-school I am?) may make actually going to repositories for your genealogy seem way old fashioned.

But just as with the State Archives, the State Library of Pennsylvania has resources and assets that can only be accessed in person.

The State Library has a mission much like the Library of Congress—collecting published sources, mainly books—but just for Pennsylvania books.

Probably the first notable thing is that the State Library has an enormous number of family history books; their collection of these books about Pennsylvania families probably only would be outranked by the aforementioned Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City.

Secondly, as might be expected, the State Library has a decent number of county-by-county holdings such as will and deed abstracts; other early courthouse records; transcripts of church records; and histories of congregations. Many of these abstract books were only published in short runs and can often only be found at county historical and genealogical libraries.

I’ve often remarked that the “thicker” the amount of shelf space for a particular county, more active you can tell that county’s genealogists are!

While working with the U.S. Census most efficiently has long shifted to online digital images, the State Library even has an asset not found online: A roll-by-roll rundown of the municipalities found on the National Archives microfilms from which today’s digital images were created. How can this be important, you ask? Well, there are times that the municipal names attached on Ancestry and FamilySearch are incorrect … this rundown gives you to way to found those “hidden” municipalities.

Another crown jewel for the State Library is its newspaper collection. It has some bound newspapers that have never been digitized by any of the free or subscription services, as well as microfilms of other undigitized publications.

The State Library also has a large collection of historical books about areas of Pennsylvania, as well as a large collection of city and county directories.

There’s an irony in giving this “Exploring” lecture at Blair County Genealogical.

That’s because when I introduce people to that repository in other lectures of mine, I often say it is the “largest genealogy library between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh,” with the State Archives and Library being the “Harrisburg” part of that!