April 8, 2015 TCGS Meeting with Richard Allen

Last Wednesday evening Richard Allen, Director of the Richland Family History Center (FHC) and TriCity Genealogical Society (TCGS) member gave an excellent presentation to the membership at the monthly meeting at the Clover Island Inn, Kennewick.  Richard’s presentation was called “New items at the Richland FHC and how to use some of the older sources”.  Richard started his talk by giving some of the history of the FHC and its association with TCGS.  Richard then went on to describe some upcoming changes to the infrastructure of the FHC to make it more appealing to patrons. 

Richard described the holdings at the FHC and that a project is ongoing to re-catalog the books and get the catalog on line.  Richard showed the members present that you could go to FamilySearch and using their catalog search engine locate the holdings for the Richland FHC.

Richard then gave a presentation showing that not all information is online by walking through some research that he had done where much of the information came from the FHC holdings.  Some this information has never been digitized and put on the internet.

This section fitted in nicely with the Archived Document Contest that TCGS is running through the beginning of next year.   (Go to the TCGS website for more information on this contest)

One other item that came up during Richard’s presentation was that the Richland FHC has some books that even the Family History Library in Salt Lake City does not have in their collections. 

So just don’t do your research online check out the Family History Centers, Family History Library, local libraries, etc as you look for the dead.

John F Covey

TCGS President