Honored Twice and Doubly Well-Stated!

The December 2011 issue of Family Tree Magazine arrived and this month's cover is their now annual feature: 75 Best State Websites.

Contributing editor Rick Crume, in the article "Well Stated" (pages 20-26), lists the magazine's 2011 picks for the seventy-five best U.S. state-focused websites for genealogical research.

In selecting this year's best state websites for genealogy, we were looking for databases where you can look for a relative's name. Many of the 75 sites (at least one per state) have indexes, and in many cases, you can even view images of original records.

The Golden State has two picks and the California Genealogical Society and Library is proud to have close ties to both!

The first is our own website CaliforniaAncestors.org.

Click the Databases tab to search more than 350,000 records – including voter registers, probate records, cemetery records and more – in the California Names Index for free. If your ancestor's name appears you can order a copy of their original record for $10. Members have online access to San Francisco church records and newspapers.

The second is the California Digital Newspaper Collection, founded by our newest board member, Dr. Henry Snyder.

Access more than 5 million California newspaper articles from 1846 to 2009.

Henry is the former director of The Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California, Riverside, where he led the California Newspaper Project from 1990 through 2009.

I've written before about Professor Snyder and the project which went digital in 2007. In case you missed it, Henry's article The California Newspaper: What Survives and How to Find It was published last year in the Fall 2010 issue of the Nugget. CGS is honored to have such an esteemed historian on our board and we're thrilled that Family Tree Magazine is bringing attention to his work.

This is the second year that the CGS website was chosen. We're honored to be listed among so many fantastic online state resources. Thank you, Family Tree Magazine!

Kudos to Kathy Watson and Larry Youngman and their technology team who work tirelessly for the society to keep our website up-to-date.

Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library