Matt Butler, digitization consultant for the Missouri State Library, introduces the wealth of resources available through the Missouri Digital Heritage website.

In this Adult Services Forum, Missouri State Library's Digitization Consultant, Matt Butler, shows how Missouri Digital Heritage can be a helpful resource for genealogists.

Matt Butler, Digitization Consultant, demonstrates how to use the Missouri County Plat Books collection, sponsored by the Missouri State Library. The collection contains a selection of county atlases and plat books from all over the state published from 1875-1930. These books contain area maps and show land ownership and property boundaries. For genealogists and other researchers, these resources can serve as a snapshot in time and provide valuable information about where ancestors may have lived.

The Missouri County History project, sponsored by the Missouri State Library, has gathered county histories from all over the state and made them accessible through Missouri Digital Heritage. These publications are predominantly from late 19th and early 20th centuries and portray the state during a period of commercial and industrial growth. Join Digitization Consultant Matt Butler and learn how county histories can offer a gold mine of information for genealogists and local historians.

This webinar was presented by Matt Butler, Digitization Consultant for the Missouri State Library. When thinking about newspaper research, people often picture someone hunched over a microfilm reader for hours at a time. Modern technology, however, now gives users the ability to view historic content like local newspapers right in their web browsers. This access offers a lot of advantages, but it's important to be aware of its limitations as well. Allied with the State Historical Society of Missouri and institutions across the state, Missouri Digital Heritage offers online access to dozens of historical local Missouri newspapers, freely available and searchable by date and keyword.