Sailor Database Review: Heritage Quest

The availability of online tools, like the HeritageQuest database from ProQuest, has made genealogy, doing family history research, much easier than it was in the past. Here’s why.

Library customers working on their genealogy rely heavily on documents, the paper trail we all leave as we go through life, to discover important facts about their families, and this is especially true when they are searching for their more distant ancestors. Genealogists look for mention of their relatives in different kinds of documents, like birth, marriage, death, cemetery, and military records, plus directories, census reports, land records, wills, and many others. To locate all the records they need to get a complete picture of their ancestors, they would have to visit lots of different libraries, archives, courthouses, and cemeteries. This is where a genealogy database like HeritageQuest becomes a big time (and gas) saver for them, because it provides access to so many different documents, all in one place.

HeritageQuest offers images of actual documents that will be of interest to beginning family historians, to skilled amateurs, and even to professional genealogists. Using HeritageQuest they can access the U.S. Federal Census (1790-1930), one of the most widely used sets of documents among all genealogists, and an invaluable starting point in family history research. HeritageQuest also makes it possible to search for the names of ancestors in published family history books, in periodicals on genealogy and local history subjects, in Revolutionary War service records, and in records of the Freedman’s Bank (an institution set up by the U. S. government to serve former slaves following the Civil War).

There are a few things to remember about HeritageQuest:

• It’s an alternative resource to Ancestry.com, another genealogy database that is commonly used in libraries for searching the U.S. Federal Census. Most family history researchers will use the census often.
• HeritageQuest also provides access to records of the Freedman’s Bank, an important resource for African American genealogy researchers.
• HeritageQuest is offered to customers of all Maryland public library systems via the Sailor project.
• It is available for use from home, for free, with a library card. That’s another way it differs from Ancestry.com, which must be used from a library facility in order to avoid a fee.

HeritageQuest is easy to use, and you might want to try it out for yourself by searching for some of your own ancestors. Who knows? You could get hooked by the genealogy bug, too!