Search results matching tags 'Databases' and 'history'

Two New Databases Emphasize U.S. & World History

Bufkinite@evpl — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:47:00 GMT

History buffs now have two new resources at their disposal 24 hours a day through the databases page at the EVPL web site. The History Resource Center: World and History Resource Center: U.S. are easy to navigate, rich resources.

History Resource Center: U.S. was named a "Best Reference" by the New York Public Library, and provides a easily searchable interface to a unique combination of primary and secondary sources. The most extensive online collection of historical information available today, History Research Center U.S. delivers:

- comprehensive coverage of the most-studied topics in U.S. history, including the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the post-Cold War era
- a "roll-over" chronology that features a graphical, annotated timeline of significant events spanning pre-Columbian prehistory to today's headlines
- more than 5,000 primary source documents, including more than 9,000 commentaries
- over 350,000 periodical articles
- over 130 reference books
- thousands of downloadable images, maps, charts, and flags

Whether you're a student in high school, college, or a life-long learner, History Resource Center: U.S. delivers unmatched pinpoint results and reliable sources, allowing you to establish the context within the content.

History Resource Center: World was named a "Best Reference" by Library Journal, and offers students and researchers access to more than 5,000 years of world history, including 15,000 pages of primary source material, more than 50 encyclopedias and compendiums, more than 150 academic journals, more than 1,600 maps, atlases and other images, hours of video content, and daily podcasts from NPR, CBC, and other reputable sources, and annotated Web links to history-specific academic and news information sites.

Featuring extensive coverage of the 20th century, this resources also features coverage of teh Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient Near East and Asia as well as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the modern Middle East and Latin America. Other highlights:

- Asian history recounts the events from Bronze Age China to modern India
- African, Indian, and Latin American history includes the end of colonization in Africa and India as well as the social and political movements in Latin America
- the same kind of "roll-over" timeline as the one featured in History Resource Center: U.S.

Both of these resources feature a very simple search tool, which allows you to search either one - or both - resource centers with one search by clicking the appropriate radio button. An example of the search box can be seen below. You can also search by a person or by a subject, and there is an advanced search option that allows you to limit by document type, historical date ranges, date of publication of the resource, and to use Boolean operators.

Evansville Historical Records for Businesses and Immigrants

seeker@evpl — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:51:00 GMT

The people at the Browning Family Foundation, who brought you the Browning Genealogy Database (Evansville area newspaper obituaries) and contributed to the Local History Database, have constructed 3 more historical databases to help local history buffs!

If you're looking for an early business and want to know when it started or who started it, many businesses filed Articles of Association with the courts. The Browning Family Foundation volunteers and employees have indexed these records covering the 1850's up to the 1980's in the Evansville, IN Business Entity Database. The Simple Search allows you to search by the name of the business or by the names of the businessmen signing the Articles of Association, usually principal officers and major investors. The record you see will include the business name, type of business, and the names of associated businessmen. Advanced search can search on any portion or combination of business type (church, oil refinery, livestock), business name, individual's name or address.

If you're interested in early immigrants to this area, check out their 2nd database. The Evansville IN Immigration Database allows you to search the intentions to immigrate and naturalization papers from 1850's to 1920's filed in Vanderburgh and Warrick Counties. In Advanced search, you will be able to search by any combination of name (last or first), birth location or date, or country emigrated from. The records differ, but may give name, petition number & page & vol number, birth date & location, country emigrated from, arrival location or vessel or date, occupation, current address, names of family members, and notes the petitioner thought important to include. These books are old and fragile and are due to soon be sent to the Indiana State Archives. As time permits, photos of the original pages will be attached to the information already abstracted so that these important documents will still be available to genealogists.

The 3rd database, Browning Obituaries, is an ongoing work-in-progress to expand the information available in the Browning Genealogy Database with obituary information from 3 more counties: White County (IL), Gibson County, and Posey County. In some cases, this will include scans of the actual newspaper obituaries with photo. Additional information available includes records, photo, and biographical essays from the Browning Funeral Home.

I was delighted to try these databases out to see how much information is in them and how many different ways they are indexed. Genealogists and those interested in local history will be first in line, but they're rather intriguing just to poke around in. Kudos to the industrious people at Browning Family Foundation for their hard work in making these databases of valuable information available!