Family History Research Made Easier Through Google Books
February 14th, 2010 Posted in Books, Family History, Research Tips, Websites
Researching and gathering material to document your Croatian family history can be a difficult task. For those who live outside of Croatia’s borders, this is especially true. Let’s face it, for many of us in North America the cost of travel to Croatia to research material first hand can be a costly venture, both in terms of time and money. Even if money and time were not a problem, visiting archives and libraries to scan all the books and documents for a particular reference alone would take us more than a lifetime.
However, what would you say if I told you of a way where you could save on cost, time and effort? Almost too good to be true you say? I kid you not. I will share with you now one of my favourite tools for research.
Thankfully, there is one useful and inexpensive tool we can use from the comfort of our own homes. I’m talking about Google Books. Believe it or not, Google Books serves as an online library of sorts and features numerous Croatian book titles within its catalog that can be found and, sometimes, even browsed for free. Much like any search engine you can enter key phrases or search terms, such as a last name i.e. “curkovic”, which will then retrieve all those titles containing the reference to the particular search term you are looking for. It’s like having someone else look in books for you! Depending on the copyright, you may then view the book in small snippets or in its entirety. Due to its powerful features, Google Books has proved to be a very valuable resource that has pointed me to numerous references related to my family name.
Finding most of these books at your local library is virtually next to impossible but if you live near and have access to a good university library featuring an excellent collection of Croatian books, like the University of Toronto, you can usually find and photocopy those relevant pages for yourself.
Gaining access to some of these university libraries is another matter though. These libraries have valuable collections and often don’t allow people off the street to just come in and browse their shelves. While you might not gain access to certain floors or areas, there is thankfully a procedure in place which allows researchers to make requests for material. These books are, after a few hours, then brought down to the front desk where the material can then be perused at leisure.
While this above option is better than nothing, let’s just hope that the good people at Google continue to work with the many libraries, publishers and authors across the world to make books and information accessible to more people and researchers like you and me. It will hopefully save us all a lot more time, money and effort (not to mention sanity) in the future. 