Joe Everett is the Family History, Local History, and Microforms Librarian at the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library. He has over 25 years combined experience in the genealogical field at BYU, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and Ancestry.com.

Joe manages the collections and patron services of the BYU Family History Library and serves as a faculty liaison to instructors in BYU's Family History undergraduate degree program and others involved in family history on campus from social to computer science.

At FamilySearch, Joe was a library program manager providing services for the more 5,000 family history centers. Previously at FamilySearch, he headed the International Reference floor at the Family History Library, and also worked for several years as a technical services librarian, cataloging Slavic and Germanic records. He has served on numerous strategic planning and program development teams at FamilySearch. At Ancestry.com, he worked in content acquisitions and content product and project management, putting genealogical databases online.

Joe earned a B.A. in Russian Language and in Family History/Genealogy (Germanic emphasis) from Brigham Young University and a Master of Library Science from Emporia State University (Kansas). He has been a member and officer in various library and genealogical associations and has lectured and published articles on U.S. and European family history research, historical geography, and migration.

29 November 2010

Czech Archives to Digitize Vital Records

Nu? What's New?, an e-newsletter published biweekly by Avotaynu, Inc. reported the following in their November 28, 2010 edition:


Czech Archives to Digitize Vital Records
It was reported on JewishGen that the Czech National Archives is digitizing their collection of vital records. It is expected that the registers of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia—births, deaths and marriages—will be available online next year. 



This is an exciting development, both for persons with Jewish heritage that traces through the Czech Republic and for Czech family history research in general. For many years, the Czech archives were resistant to efforts to microfilm or digitize their records.  It is encouraging to see that they are working on their own digitization.  Hopefully, this effort will extend to the records of other religious denominations.