BRATTLEBORO — The June meeting of the Windham County Genealogy Interest Group will be held as a hybrid meeting: in person at the Brooks Memorial Library Meeting Room and via Zoom on Saturday, June 18, at 11 a.m.
The Library of Congress along with the National Endowment for the Humanities has a website called Chronicling America that contains historic American newspapers.
Part of the website includes a U.S. newspaper directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690 to the present. Not all of these newspapers are online, but the directory can provide information about where they are located. The website also includes the digitized newspaper collection, which includes a wide variety of newspapers published between 1777 and 1963.
This free website is searchable by name and date, and includes ways to narrow the search by State, by Ethnicity, and by Language. It is also possible to limit a search to a specific newspaper. Participants will explore ways to use this valuable resource to find information about ancestors.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was established by an act of Congress in 1934 to preserve, maintain, and make accessible materials that record American history. The collections go back to 1775 and were created by or for the U.S. government.
The holdings usually consulted by genealogists include Census records, military service records, military pension files, and other important records to trace family histories.
The NARA website is complex and can be intimidating to use. During this session, presenters will offer an overview of the extent of NARA's collections for a better understanding of using its web site and databases.
The Windham County Genealogy Interest Group is an informal organization whose members are dedicated to genealogy education, research, and best practices. Meetings are held every other month on Zoom.
Many of these sessions have been recorded and are available on the WCGIG YouTube Channel, which cover topics such as: improving your search results in FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com; using family tree software; navigating the crowd sources cemetery database, Find A Grave; using land records for genealogy research; using AmericanAncestors.org, the database of the New England Historic Genealogical Society; and finding people in the newly released 1950 U.S. Census.
The meeting is free and open to the public. Register at bit.ly/WindhamGenJun. Attendees in person are encouraged to wear masks. For more information, contact windhamcountygig@gmail.com.