Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Special Newberry Materials

Collection Guides
The Newberry has quite a few collection guides that organize and help guide genealogical research. They also display the extensive number of materials represented by different genealogical topics that the Newberry has in its collection. Some of these collection guides include the following:
  • Adoption guides
  • Census holdings
  • Chicago area neighborhood, church and synagogue records
  • Ethnic group/country guides
  • Fraternity guides
  • Geography/map guides
  • Military guides
  • Newspaper records
  • Noble ancestry guides
  • Transportation passenger guides
Genealogical Index of the Newberry Library
This index was created by genealogical librarians at the Newberry over the course of twenty years. It includes references to 3,000 different genealogical items published before 1917, and therefore contains quite a bit of valuable information involving the early genealogical collection. The index itself is rather difficult to use because it is so old and because most of the call numbers that it refers one to have been superseded. The library provides users with "how-to" handouts for the index because of this.

The Family Research Files
These research files are records that have been donated by genealogists or families. The files are incredible because they are composed of a mix of correspondences, newspapers and even personal journals among other documents. The files are organized by family surnames.

Genealogy Readings
Different materials have been published to help familiarize people with the Newberry's genealogy collection.

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