Local Archives and Other Repositories After Saturday's inspiring panel discussion about how to find the majority of the genealogy and family history records which have been collected for research, we thought to consult our own repository: the  blog index  on our great website, skcgs.org .  Since the beginning, we have been visiting local area archives and museums and reporting back to you, our readers. Katie led us off with  Black Diamond, Washington  about the history of Black Diamond and the great Black Diamond Museum and Historical Society. More here  also her visit to the  New England Historical and Genealogical Society  in Boston. Cheri Sayer came to SKCGS from the Greater Kent Historical Societ y and she also visited the Highline Heritage Museum . Note: Highline Heritage has a new link .  Barbara Mattoon visited and wrote about the   Des Moines Museum ;  r ead on to see even more examples of local repositories. Nearly every c...

  Image courtesy Pikist We say repeatedly, “Don’t neglect books, not everything is online or ever will be.” But what do we do when the libraries are closed? Books.google.com Good news! You can still search for books. Perhaps the source best known by the public is Google Books. According to the New York Times, Google has scanned over 25 million books. [1] I entered “History of the Ball Family in Virginia” and got hundreds of books and journals. I need to refine my search to determine which Ball family. Ancestry.com Ancestry.com   has also published books. Going to Search > Card Catalog > Stories Memories & Histories and entering the keywords Ball and Virginia brought up 17 books including information about the Ball family in Virginia. The first hit was a book containing a biographical sketch of Mrs. Mary Ball Washington, the mother of George Washington. Reviewing the list, I saw others I need to review as I research that line. FamilySearch.org FamilySear...