Records can be elusive. Family information could be in an array of documents – school records, passenger lists, cemeteries, biographies, naturalization papers, family bibles, collections of family papers journals – the list goes on and on. But where can they be found?
According to D. Joshua Taylor, director of family history at findmypast.com and current president of the Federation of Genealogical Societies, the answer is “PERSI” – the acronym used to describe the PERiodical Source Index created by the Allen County Public Library (ACPL) in Ft Wayne, Indiana. PERSI is a subject index of genealogy, family history and history related articles available in small publications, typically produced by genealogy and family history societies around the world. Taylor explained the features of PERSI and its applications to Family History on Friday at RootsTech, the world’s largest Family History Technology Conference.
Taylor explained that the genealogy center at the ACPL holds the largest English-language genealogy and local history periodical collection in the world with more than 6200 current subscriptions and more than 10,000 titles – and the collection grows continually.
“ACPL has indexed project periodicals published 20-40 years ago. Inclusive of newer journals, it is also updates older ones. Within the scope of the FindMyPast partnership, PERSI is rapidly transitioning into a 21st century genealogy resource,“ Taylor said.
PERSI is now available on Findmypast.com. It includes indexes and an ever increasing number of images of family histories, cemetery transcriptions, historical profiles of communities, record abstracts, descriptions of local records collections and much, much more. “Taking advantage of this resource may provide numerous clues to your ancestors and help you find otherwise ‘lost’ documents,” Taylor said.Use it to help trace migrations, find record extracts, family crests, family histories, community histories and printed volumes. To search its content online, go to www.findmypast.com. Click on “Search,” then “Newspapers and Periodicals,” and “periodical source index.” At the top of the webpage are boxes for search information.
PERSI is a high level index. When doing queries, think of it as something more equivalent to a table of contents than an index in a book. Fill in the search boxes with generalized information – periodical titles, surnames, locations, general subjects, full names, etc and click into the search.
By using filters, searches can dig deeper to find detailed information on what is available and find document transcriptions and sometimes images of original documents. Use the filter wisely – sometimes giving less information provides more possibilities. Don’t narrow it too much, he advises.
“One of the reasons I love the Allen County Public Library is that because they created PERSI, they have the publications in their library. I can go to their library and find information,” Taylor says. He also finds information on locations of documents through inter-library loans, other libraries, from publishers, repositories, etc.
