Reminders about Temporary Free Remote Access to Library Edtion until April 30th; Free Access to Certain NARA Record Collections on Ancestry.com

Hey Everyone!

Ancestry Library EdtitionWe wanted to remind everyone of two developments with Ancestry.com that might help ease your (or a child's or grandchild's) boredom during this extended time of "Stay at Home, Stay Safe." Hopefully you saw our earlier posts here and here.

Ancestry Library Edition

The first reminder is that if you have a library card issued by the Suburban Library Cooperative than as of late last week you now have temporary free remote access to Ancestry Library Edition from where ever you are, hopefully you are home. This temporary free remote access is good thru April 30, 2020.

You can access Ancestry Library Edition by signing into the website of the library that issued your library card and then clicking the link to Ancestry Library Edition. You will be taken to the Ancestry Library Edition home page and from there you can search to your heart's content. Ancestry Library Edition has no personalized features so among other things you can not access your personal Ancestry online tree or link records to it if you have one. So you will need to remember to download your record image finds and add the information to your genealogy trees manually.

We will be creating an Overview of Ancestry Library Edition video for our YouTube channel in case you need to brush up on the website. Since these areas are common to the Ancestry.com personal home subscription it will help you brush up on using Ancestry.com as well. This video should be up in a day or so.

ProQuest (a database provider to businesses such as libraries) in coordination with Ancestry.com has made this free offer to libraries that have subscriptions to Ancestry Library Edition for in-library use. If your library has Ancestry Library Edition and its website meets certain requirements your library can request to participate in the temporary free remote access to. Just email and ask them. The sooner you do, the sooner you can enjoy searching from home too.

We thank everyone who made this possible.

Ancestry.com

In the meantime,  there is our second reminder that Ancestry.com in cooperation with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has made certain record collections from NARA available for free access during this COVID-19 time.

Ancestry has now created a special search page for the free offer. On the search page is a link to the NARA record collections included in the free access offer. A quick look at the list shows all the U.S. Federal Census enumerations; a variety of passenger lists including Baltimore and New York to name couple; naturalization records for various locations; some tax records; some military records; some Freedman's records; and some Native American rolls. Take a look, there is a lot there to search.

To take advantage of this free access to NARA records, you simply need a free guest account. Do remember that usually a free username will not request your credit card information. Do not click on the free trial because that will require your credit card information. This page here is the one needed to create a free username (no credit card.) The other option now that a special search page has been created is to do a search and select a record image to view. Then the website will request you sign-in or create a free guest account. If you need to create a free account the website will take you to the page given above. Remember free guests accounts do not expire so if you have one just sign into that one. If you do not recall either your username or password, request a new password using your email address. If you recall, each Ancestry account requires a unique email address.

Use Ancestry as a Teaching Tool
Now about those kids or grandkids that might be going stir-crazy by now. Remember Ancestry announced on its Ancestry blog that it is making teacher-developed lesson plans available for free for anyone to download, covering a range of educational topics for various ages. There is list of teacher-developed lesson plans listed on the blog post. And now more information can be found on a special Ancestry Education page. While the page promotes its free AncestryK12 no-cost program you can find the free lesson plans under the Resources link including links to other free research guides and research aids like a PDF of Interview Questions to ask family members. So get those kids and grandkids to help you with your genealogical research and then talk with them about what they found and what it might have been like in those times. You can do it remotely (keep to social distancing guidelines) using today's video chatting technology or simply with your phone.

Stay Safe Everyone.

See you soon at Mt. Clemens Public Library!
LE