Please Consider Donating to the Godfrey's Annual Fund

It's fall.  Here in New England, that means getting out the winter clothes, bringing in the plants, stacking the firewood.  Some of us carry on the tradition of canning and putting up preserves.

 

As I go through this yearly ritual, I am reminded of going with my grandmother to check on her root cellar, a climate controlled, secure space filled with squash, pumpkins and other root vegetables.  It was like discovering treasure.  All winter long these vegetables would stay fresh because they were chosen and cared for in a special way.

 

It occurs to me that in many ways Godfrey is like a giant "root cellar" filled with books and documents, containing treasured information, preserved to help genealogists find their roots.      

A lot of time, effort and money goes into maintaining the library and our prized collection.  Our work now requires increased technology expertise and equipment as we continue to make materials available to our remote patrons.  We are especially proud of how much we added to our Godfrey Scholar online access this year. (see below for a list)

 

Please consider making a gift to the Godfrey Annual Fund.  We receive no public funding.  We thrive on the day to day efforts of our volunteers and donations from patrons like you.  Your contribution goes directly to the care and maintenance of the library and our collection.

-Beth Mariotti, Executive Director

For information on donating the the Annual Fund please contact the library at 860-346-4375.

Content added to Godfrey Scholar over the last year

 

AGBI

All 226 volumes of the AGBI organized alphabetically by surname and Finding Aids which can be used to determine the abbreviated citations and link right to the digital books on the Scholar.    

• more than 4 million names from over 800 books from our original collection and

• more than 2 million records from the Boston Transcript weekly genealogy column

Cemeteries
157 cemeteries with 45,880 burials listed

Funeral Home Records

31,322 records from index cards and 93 volumes from five funeral homes spanning 1882-1974

Church Records

28 volumes of Connecticut church record books containing 12,195 baptisms, marriages, deaths and admissions from 1668 to 1874

Vital Records

15797 Central Connecticut vital records entries from early 1700s to 1900

Digital Books

534 total new books browsable in page viewer and searchable

139 books previously on the Scholar were converted from PDF format to the page viewer and made searchable

The AGBI: A Brief Overview

A phone call from a curious Godfrey Scholar prompted us to think once again about library founder Fremont Rider's greatest contribution to the field to genealogy, the American Genealogical-Biographical Index.  For those who are unfamiliar, the American Genealogical Biographical Index, or AGBI, is a 226 volume index of all names mentioned in nearly every genealogical work available at the time of the index's publication.  It was a massive undertaking, one that Fremont Rider sadly did not live to see completed.

Until last year the only way to read the AGBI was to visit one of the few libraries and historical centers with sets or to request scans of pages you needed from the Godfrey.  Now that the AGBI is available in full on the Godfrey Scholar doors are opened to researchers all over the world, no matter their proximity to a physical copy of the index!

Of course, being able to read the index is of little use if you do not know how to interpret the information.  Rider and his assistants set up the AGBI using Rider's own system of cataloging and abbreviation that can be difficult to decipher.  Names are arranged alphabetically by last name.  Each page has two columns of names, the head of each column being the last name and the following entries being the first names of people corresponding to the last name.  The work in which the person is mentioned and the page on which they are mentioned, as well as brief genealogical information (approximate dates of birth and death, military service, place of residence) are listed after the name.  Unfortunately, due to this abnormal setup we are not able to make the AGBI searchable through the Scholar Search portion of our website- browsing using the Page Viewer is the best method of navigation.  A detailed guide to using the AGBI is available in the Scholar digital library as well as on the library's website.  It can be viewed here.  

The names of genealogical works have almost all been abbreviated in the AGBI.  Rider provides a key to those abbreviations in the first volume and the Godfrey has also created a Abbreviation Key for ease of use.  Our Abbreviation Key, located on the Godfrey Scholar, contains not only the key to decoding the abbreviations, but also links to any of the sources that are available for free online.

Although no longer a complete index of every genealogical work published, the AGBI is still an unparallelled source of information.  Patrons tell us time and time again that what they find in the AGBI has broken through walls in their research and exposed them to sources they never knew existed.  If you're a Godfrey Scholar and haven't checked it out, why not do so today!  If you aren't a Godfrey Scholar you can still request page scans from the AGBI or make an AGBI search request, for a small fee.

To request page scans or to become a Godfrey Scholar please contact the library at (860) 346-4375