How to Use This Guide
Welcome to the Tisch Library guide to resources in Genealogy & Family History. Use the table of contents to find definitions, topic overviews, books, articles, and more that will help you with your research.
About Genealogy & Family History Research
Genealogy is the act of compiling your ancestors names, dates, and places of births, marriages, and death; family history is filling in the story behind those names and dates and bringing them to life. To do the latter you will want to do regular historical research around the events and times your ancestor lived using traditional library tools.
You will also want to do secondary research, as opposed to the actual birth, marriage, death records, or primary research, to see if someone else has researched your family. This includes genealogies, family histories in books, and articles in genealogical and historical society magazines and journals. The resources in this guide will help you to do that research.
Getting to Know Your Topic: Background & Context
Reference sources--like dictionaries and subject encyclopedias, provide overviews of topics and descriptions of concepts and ideas. They can also provide definitions, statistics, and other details. You can use this type of source to help narrow your research topic, find data to support your thesis, and identify keywords and main ideas to use as search terms.
- Credo ReferenceOnline reference resources from numerous publishers. This reference resource can be searched by individual title, broad subject headings, cross-references, audio and images. Use its research mapper to search for terms and topics that are interconnected and displayed in (a) visual form. Examples of titles are: Bloomsbury Guide to Art, Bridgeman Art Library Archive, Columbia Encyclopedia, Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, Harvard Dictionary of Music, and the Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science. The complete list of titles is available on the CREDO Reference site.
- Oxford ReferenceProvides web access to more than 100 major Oxford University Press dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works in the humanities, social sciences, foreign languages, science, technology and medicine, the performing arts, and religion. Works can be searched separately or across the entire databases. Includes over 1.5 million entries.
- Gale eBooksGale eBooks is a database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
Find Books and Articles in JumboSearch
Want to discover everything that Tisch Library has on your topic? Try searching for your topic in JumboSearch, which simultaneously searches across all of the library's resources, including: books from the library catalog; journal articles in databases, online and in print; research guides on your topic; digital files from the Archives; and much, much more!
