List of Research Facilities and Favourite Websites - International Institute

Forms
Resource Centres and Websites

You will be visiting many centres where source materials are kept.

Many genealogical societies have libraries full of valuable information. Public and private libraries also house resource materials. And let’s not forget visits to the most extensive and important library, the FamilySearch Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and its world-wide FamilySearch Centers.

Using this form, you can keep track of all the special places where you go to do research. You can list the specific types of records or documents each place holds. You can add their hours of operation and when you were there, if you wish.

As a variation, you may want to create one similar form for each resource centre (or website) that you can turn to each time you plan to visit it.

Words of advice about the Internet and websites: The Internet or World Wide Web has gained astounding popularity for surfers and searchers of genealogical information. So much so, that amateur family historians are eagerly taking any and all information that “looks like their family” and incorporating it into their own research binders or software programs. They are becoming known as “name collectors” and it has little to do with research or evaluation of their sources or analysis of the information.

Unless you are viewing scanned or digitized images, what you see on website family trees, names and dates (and for that matter, CD-ROM compilations) is information that someone else has copied, transcribed, abstracted, indexed and/or compiled. In other words, a website is a derivative source.

Don’t be a mere “name collector”! Use your Internet findings as just more clues to original sources that you should view yourself.

Although you may bookmark (favorites) a website of interest, a form like this provides space for a re-cap of why you want to return to it, and/or what your direct interest in it was.

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Information in this Wiki page is excerpted from the online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. To learn more about these courses or other courses available from the Institute, see our website. We can be contacted at [mailto:wiki@genealogicalstudies.com wiki@genealogicalstudies.com]

We welcome updates and additions to this Wiki page.