Allen County Public Library has a new PERSI search
Past halfway in the German Gothic and Fraktur course at the virtual Salt Lake Institute of Genealogist this week, and The Legal Genealogist continues to fight to slay those handwritten dragons. Is that really a capital B even though it looks like a capital L? Why do the lower-case e, n, u and even occasionally m all look exactly the same in that pastor’s handwriting?
Sigh… it was such a pleasure to get to the Fraktur font materials yesterday afternoon — they’re soooooooo much easier.
But it’s back to the handwriting today, so …
Another snippet.
This one, with a great big tip of the hat to my friend and colleague Cari Taplin who posted on her blog, Genealogy Pants, about a newly-launched entry portal to search PERSI — the Periodical Source Index — from Indiana’s Allen County Public Library.
As its name suggests, PERSI is an index to genealogy and local history periodicals, and it’s been produced by the staff of The Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library (ACPL, for short) for decades. Some years back, ACPL partnered with Findmypast.com to make the index available there as well.
Free on both sites, the index was more than a little clunky on both: you need a free account at Findmypast to access the index, and finding what you wanted means navigating through a bunch of filters. At ACPL, well, let’s just say that the old interface would remind you fondly of operating systems we haven’t seen on our computers in some time…
So… a new version, newly launched, at ACPL is a welcome refresh to this tool, and you can find it here: https://www.genealogycenter.info/persi/.
A quick test of the results returned between the index at this new ACPL PERSI and the index at Findmypast does turn up some differences. For example, searching the surname Baker at the new ACPL PERSI, I got 3,694 results. At Findmypast, it was 3,459 results. For the surname Davenport, at the new ACPL PERSI, 644 results; at Findmypast, 618 results. I suspect it has to do in part with the lag time in updating the index at Findmypast, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch on that being the only explanation (differences in search algorithms likely play a role too).
In any case, this tool continues to be one of the most valuable resources for finding published articles about our families — we can search surnames, locations, types of records mentioned in articles and more. Then we can take the actions needed to get access to those articles to add to our research.
Check it out at the Allen County Public Library: https://www.genealogycenter.info/persi/.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Snippet: A new PERSI launch,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 13 Jan 2022).
Remember using the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature? I pulled them off the shelves at the LoC a couple of years ago. Kinda fun to use them outside a college setting. Technology makes this so much easier!
Pamela – PERSI is not the same as the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. PERSI is a subject index for articles in genealogy and local history periodicals at the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library.
Always love to see my local library getting praise for the Genealogy Center’s innovations that make it one of the best, if not the best, public library systems for genealogy in the country! Let’s go, ACPL!!