Fantastic Find: National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)

Included among Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs roundup last week was a great post by Paula Stuart-Warren on the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC):

Did you ever wonder if a family bible might be in a historical society somewhere? Maybe that missing set of Justice of the Peace records is in an archive in a distant state. Where are the records of the fraternal organization that Uncle Sylvester joined? Might the records of the local midwife still be in existence? 

These are manuscripts. These are original records. You may be scratching your head trying to find such items. Of course you check the historical society and archives websites of the counties and states where the person or family resided. Yet, any of these records could be in a distant state. We are fortunate to have several finding aids that assist us in locating these records no matter where they might be housed. 

Paula describes NUCMC:

An important finding aid is the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), a cooperative cataloging program via the Library of Congress. In 1959, repositories all across the U.S. that held manuscript collections began providing the LOC with the descriptions of ones they held.

She spends the rest of the blog describing how to access and search NUCMC "and its Cousins."  A must read for anyone looking to delve more deeply in their genealogical or historical research.




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