The Blackwell's Kinfolk Family Tree highlights two prominent members. Arthur Ashe Jr.'s name is in gold, right. Family genealogist Thelma Short Doswell is highlighted in yellow, left .  Photo from Library of Congress, blog September 28, 2023 Have you checked out "our" library recently? By "our" library, I don't mean the library branch in your neighborhood, although it is definitely a place that should be very familiar to you. I mean the library that belongs to all of us--the Library of Congress.   At our fingertips we have the ability to  search millions of items in many formats and languages; to explore a growing treasury of digitized materials .  This is one of the most valuable resources available for enhancing our knowledge and understanding of the lives of our ancestors.  It's very easy to remember the URL--loc.gov.    Library of Congress Blogs | Blogs from the Library of Congress (loc.gov) And the collections and exhibits are constantly expandi

Picture courtesy Freepix and Vecteezy This month SKCGS celebrates FIVE years of blogging! We've covered many topics from basic techniques to more involved methodology.  Members have contributed marvelous family stories and pictures.  You have truly made this your blog! Several of our blogs have featured online resources, either as a topic or as a source of information.  One of our more frequent of these is "Chronicling America", the free  online digital newspaper collection site at the Library of Congress .  The Library of Congress has programs aimed at middle and high school students as part of their National History Day competition.  One of the resources for research is, of course, Chronicling America and LOC is presenting: Chronicling America: "Turning Points in History" Wednesday, September 6, 2023 1 - 2 pm EDT Explore Turning Points in History and learn to use Chronicling America, a freely-available collection of historic American newspapers at the Library

Screenshot shows the default view of the new "Exploring Chronicling America Newspapers" interactive map and timeline [1] Somehow this week I received a copy of the Library of Congress blog, The Signal, in which I found the news about this new feature at Chronicling America. I had not subscribed to this blog before but I certainly will now!  Perhaps you might find it useful as well:    https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/ Interactive Map and Timeline This interactive map of newspapers in the Chronicling America digital library will be a tremendous help in finding the newspapers in your neck of the woods.  Just click on a dot near the area in which you are searching and you get a pop-up with the name of the town and newspapers published in that area.  Neat! Clicking on the underlined text will take you directly to the issues where you may browse or, with the title of the available newspapers, you can do a search by name or phrase.  Not all states are included; this is a work in pro