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.

13 October 2014

Petition in UK To Allow Public Access to Birth, Marriage and Death Records

I wish I could sign this! I hope that UK citizens will do so!

Petition in UK To Allow Public Access to Birth, Marriage and Death Records
Jan Meisels Allen, Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee, reports a petition has started to open the civil registration records (birth, marriage and death) both online and at the registration office for England and Wales. Currently, the only way to obtain a civil record is to submit a payment to the General Register Office (GRO). The person behind this campaign is Guy Etchells, the man who is behind the push to get the 1911 Census released. Etchells says by making the records immediately accessible it is a win-win as the GRO can focus on the “core task of recording and administering current registrations” and genealogical organizations may wish to digitize the records and the government would receive licensing fees. The petition is available at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/62779. Only UK citizens, ex-pat, or people actually live in the UK can sign this petition.

Additional information is at http://www.gouldgenealogy.com/2014/09/download-uk-bdm- records-maybe.


(Reposted from Nu? What's New?" The E-zine of Jewish Genealogy.)