When I first started researching my family history nothing was online, and books and libraries were almost equally important as visits to archives. I spent many happy hours extracting all instances of rarer surnames from any suitable volume with an index. The lengthy outpourings of the many record societies remain a vital resource even now.
In the digital age, libraries have tended to lose their appeal for family historians. However, they are making a comeback as a huge hinterland of printed resources becomes available online. Much of it is just as valuable as ever.
A library lies at the heart of the FamilySearch offerings. Now, the enormous free site's international genealogy library collection is being digitised and is accessible to family historians as never before, with a milestone of 500,000 books recently reached: familysearch.org/library/books.
Google Books () began as an attempt to scan the content of major libraries, but soon ran into copyright problems. Searching FamilySearch's library sometimes results in a Google
