Family History Center offers wealth of information

If you haven’t been to a Family History Center recently,it’s time to go back.

It had been years since I used the Family History Center operated in Bangor by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The little room I used to visit at the church on Grandview Avenue was packed with resources, so imagine my delight in finding that the LDS center is now in larger quarters, thanks to the church’s expansion a few years ago.

Roberta Moulton is the director of the library, and I visited with Gail Kill, one of several volunteers who staff the facility.

“We have four microfilm readers and four fiche readers, and a lot of indefinite loan storage,” she explained. The center has augmented its own collections with items borrowed long term from the headquarters in Salt Lake City.

The countless rolls of film at the center include not only the Maine census records for 1790 through 1920, but a variety of other items.

Can’t get to Augusta to use the microfilmed town records, many of which contain vital records? The Family History Center likely has them. In fact, there’s a wonderful notebook where you can look up the resources, whether by surname or by locality. Also, the card catalog is cross-referenced.

Then, too, anything the center does not have can be ordered from Salt Lake City. It will arrive in a week or 10 days, Kill explained, and $3.25 per microfilm roll will reserve the material at the center for your use for three weeks.

The Mormons are known for their wonderful and extensive work in genealogy. The church originally microfilmed many of the records we use around the state.

Much of the information that we find on their Web site, www.familysearch.org, is the result of decades of work they have done extracting vital records from towns and cities around the world. There also are many ancestral records that have been submitted by individuals – info that you should corroborate on your own, like any compiled information.

The work of extracting vital records continues in more than 50 countries, Kill said. Its purpose is to help with the ordinances the church offers as part of its religious faith, but the Mormons also make the genealogical information available to the public without obligation.

The Family History Center in Bangor has seen its book collection grow recently thanks to the efforts of Viola Hawkins, a church member who spent a one-year mission in Salt Lake City. She bought many older books the church no longer needed for its collection in Utah.

Thus the Bangor center now has books from the “Collection of the Worcester Society of Antiquity,” the “History of Berkshire County, Mass.,” “The Granite Monthly” about New Hampshire, “Rhode Island Vital Records,” and many other items.

The center also has some published family histories, as well as shelves of family histories that people are working on. Three notebooks give good information on where to write for information in states and countries.

A rare resource is a collection of some cemetery records from Vermont, copied or compiled by Kill’s mother-in-law there.

Charts and forms are available for a modest cost for those who wish to purchase them.

“The thing I really work with is research logs,” Kill said of the practice of keeping track of which sources you’ve checked for which family lines.

The library at the Bangor church has resources on CD as well, and computers to use them. However, the computers do not have the speed necessary to access the Mormon Web site, so that work should be done on your own computer or on one at a public library or other facility.

To find the nearest Family History Center, Kill recommends looking up the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in your phone book. Those with a family history center will list it, sometimes as “genealogy library.”

According to the Mormon Web site, there are Family History Centers in Bangor, Caribou, Cape Elizabeth, Glen Cove, Farmingdale, Farmington, Oxford, Topsham and Waterville.

The center in Bangor is open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. and 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on Saturday. You may call for information during library hours, 947-5624. If you wish to write the library, write Roberta Moulton, at R2 Box 2920, College Road, Old Town 04468.

The Washington County Genealogical Society will meet at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Peavey Memorial Library in Eastport. All are welcome. Membership is $10 a year, including the newsletter Woods and Weirs. For information, call Frances Raye at 853-6630 or Valdine Atwood at 255-4432.

If you’re planning a trip to the Maine State Archives in Augusta, you may want to call first, 287-5795. The search room was closed last week because of a water leak in the archives. The library is open.

3084. DANFORTH. Looking for a book on the local Danforth families. My sister remembers borrowing one in the early ’50s from someone who worked near the courthouse in Bangor. Marlene Danforth Libby, 25 Bates Road, Holden 04429.

Send queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor, ME 04401; or send e-mail to familyti@bangordailynews.net.