Have you bookmarked JSTOR Daily yet?

Back in October 2014, The Legal Genealogist discovered something all genealogists have to add to their reading list.

It’s called JSTOR Daily, it’s irresistable — and it’s packed with great information.¹

Including information written specifically for our community.

By a member of our community.

Every single post on JSTOR Daily is well-written and points towards some terrific information.

That by itself would make JSTOR Daily worth reading.

But, since April, genealogists have had an even better reason for reading JSTOR Daily: it now features articles pretty nearly every week by genealogy’s own D. Joshua Taylor — articles focused on using JSTOR’s deep resources for family history research.

Now JSTOR, in case you’re not familiar with it, is:

a not-for-profit organization, founded to help academic libraries and publishers.

JSTOR is a shared digital library created in 1995 to help university and college libraries free up space on their shelves, save costs, and provide greater levels of access to more content than ever before. More generally, by digitizing content to high standards and supporting its long-term preservation, we also aim to help libraries and academic publishers transition their activities from print to digital operations. Our aim is to expand access to scholarly content around the world and to preserve it for future generations. We provide access to some or all of the content free of charge when we believe we can do so while still meeting our long-term obligations.

JSTOR currently includes more than 2,000 academic journals, dating back to the first volume ever published, along with thousands of monographs and other materials relevant for education. We have digitized more than 50 million pages and continue to digitize approximately 3 million pages annually. Our activities, our fee structure, and the way we manage the service and its resources reflect our historical commitment to serve colleges and universities as a trusted digital archive, and our responsibility to publishers as stewards of their content. This underlying philosophy at JSTOR remains the core of our service even as we continue to seek ways to expand access to people beyond academic institutions.²

If you have access to JSTOR through your community or academic library, JSTOR has extremely rich and deep content in categories ranging from world culture to law. If you don’t, then as individuals, we can access some free offerings from JSTOR, with an ability to save a very small number at a time of articles to a personal library. And there’s a paid option called JPASS, for $19.50 a month or $199 a year, with unlimited access to about 85% of the journals JSTOR has.³ And JPASS is often on sale at genealogical conferences.

Okay… so JSTOR is cool — but it can be overwhelming. That’s where JSTOR Daily and Josh’s guidance to its resources come into play. Because every article is documented with links to JSTOR content that may give us some ideas of where to go to find out more — and Josh’s articles are geared to our particular interests as genealogists.

Right now, Josh’s articles at JSTOR Daily include (in reverse chronological order):

• “Unlocking Your Ancestor’s Political Leanings,” an overview of using JSTOR to get more information about the political positions taken by our ancestors⁴ — with links to articles by others about abolition, voting patterns and even political involvement by our female ancestors.

• “The American Revolution and Genealogy Research,” a guide to researching those patriot ancestors — and Loyalists too — with a special look at how religious beliefs may have influenced loyalties at the time.⁵

• “The History of Graduation Ceremonies and Other School Rituals,” an article that begins with this question: “What was school like for our parents, grandparents, and the rest of our ancestors?” and goes on to provide some answers.⁶

• “Population Studies for the Genealogist,” a look at how genealogists could use methods employed by those studying historical populations to gain a deeper understanding of our ancestors’ lives.⁷ — with links to articles by others abour abolition, voting patterns and even political involvement by our female ancestors.

• “Our Farming Ancestors,” a look at the traditions of the family farm — and what life was like for a farmer and his family in the past.⁸

• “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Your Ancestors,” an examination of the flu epidemic believed to have killed 40-50 million people around the world — and that impacted every one of our families.⁹

• “The Genealogy Factor: Graveyards & Gravestones,” a look at the art of the gravestone — what some of the symbolism means, for example — as well as at the way an archeologist looks at a burial ground, and what we can learn from that.¹⁰

All of these articles — and all of the JSTOR Daily posts in all categories — are full of links deep into JSTOR content that is relevant to the topic … and useful in our research.

JSTOR Daily is for our personal use only — the site’s terms of use provide that readers may “display and print for your personal, non-commercial use portions of content from JSTOR Daily. You may not otherwise alter or use any of the content without … prior written consent nor may you undertake any activity such as computer programs that automatically download or export JSTOR Daily content …. You may use a hypertext link … to our content so long as the link does not state or imply any sponsorship or endorsement of your site by us or any other affiliation with JSTOR Daily.”¹¹

This is nice stuff — with some good ideas about where to go for more information. And you can get JSTOR Daily (all of it, Josh’s articles and much more) delivered by email through the JSTOR Newsletter.

Highly recommended.

SOURCES