Center for Family History and Genealogy

You may have never heard of The Center for Family History and Genealogy. This is an organization at Brigham Young University whose mission is to utilize BYU resources to simplify the finding of ancestors and the discovery of the world in which they lived; and support the training of students for life-long temple and family history service. It shares a partnership with several other organizations including

• Religious Education
• Department of History
• School of Family Life
• Family, Home, and Social Sciences
• Computer Science Department
• State Archives of Niedersachsen, Germany
• State Archives of Bavaria, Germany

I have found few references to the Center but nevertheless it has a lot of valuable resources. It's student employees provide some of the support for the Immigrant Ancestors Project which uses emigration registers to locate information about the birthplaces of immigrants in their native countries, which is not found in the port registers and naturalization documents in the destination countries. Volunteers working with scholars and researchers at Brigham Young University are creating a database of millions of immigrants based on these emigration registers.

The Center for Family History and Genealogy also has a number of publications and other resource materials available for sale and on-line. Although its Web site appears to be poorly maintained, you should be aware of this resource.