Have you ever gotten the urge to explore your family roots? Amelia is incredibly rich in history, and that urge can be awfully strong. If you are an amateur genealogist, then we have three places we highly recommend for you to visit. The first, of course, is the Amelia Historical Society. They have many family records housed there, and are always ready to help researchers. The second is the Library of Virginia, for records outside of Amelia, and for anything that involves primary documents on Virginia history. Lastly is one of our own electronic databases, Heritage Quest.

Heritage Quest is a fantastic resource, allowing researchers access to transcribed US Census records up through 1930. Electronic books on genealogy and history are searchable from the database. Transcribed records from the Freedman’s Bank, a national institution that catered to freed African Americans after the Civil War, are also available, as are other congressional records relating to individual citizens.

As you can guess, this is a wonderful resource for American history in general, and family researchers in particular. If you have any questions about how to use Heritage Quest, or any of our Electronic Resources, please just give us a call!

We have been adding electronic resources to the library’s collections for several years now. You can access Encyclopedia Britannica online, standardized test preparation programs, full-text e-books, and databases that provide you with full-text articles from traditionally published magazines and journals. All you need is to click the link to the left that says “Electronic Resources” and enter in the username and password that are pasted on the back of your card.

Each of the sites gives lots of different information. Some are more suitable for younger researchers, while the depth and breadth of others are really designed for older students and adults. I’ll look at different ones in the next couple of blog posts.

Finditva is the longest running electronic resource that we offer. The Library of Virginia purchases these databases with federal grant money for all public libraries to use. Useful to researchers of all ages, the database collection offers a section just for young children, for students of current events, for literary criticism, and even current financial information. I have used the databases to answer school- and work-related questions from elementary school children, teens and adult professionals.

Interested in an article from the New York Times? How about Newsweek? Or maybe Pro Farmer, Discover, Nursing, Smithsonian, or Calliope? All of them are available in full-text from finditva. Now, some resources only give abstracts or citations, but if you find these in time, you can email or call us with all the bibliographic information and we will try to find the article you need from another library. Of course, interlibrary loans (the fancy name for this) take time, so please give us a couple of weeks to get them in for you!