On December 28, I published an announcement stating that the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut, is in the process of dropping HeritageQuest Online from its portfolio of offerings. This caused a lot of consternation amongst genealogists, as this had been a very popular offering for the Library.
Many genealogists had joined the Godfrey Memorial Library's membership program for $35 a year solely for the purpose of accessing HeritageQuest Online and its many excellent databases of census records, digitized genealogy and local history books, Revolutionary War pensions, and more. That's a bit ironic as most Americans already could obtain free access to the same databases. The few that cannot find free access can obtain access via several other providers for $35 a year or less.
In the discussion board on http://www.eogn.com, newsletter reader Chris Dunham wrote:
Has anyone thought of maintaining a list online of participating libraries and societies? Maybe an entry for HeritageQuest Online could be added to the Encyclopedia of Genealogy so that visitors could add (or delete, as necessary) access points.
I thought Chris' suggestion was a good one so I created such a page and added information about 40 such libraries. Since then, that page has been updated hundreds of times by other newsletter readers.
That page on the Encyclopedia of Genealogy now provides a very long list of libraries that offer free, in-home access to HeritageQuest Online. It also lists nine more organizations that provide in-home access for a fee. Five of them do so for less than $40 a year.
You can find this long list on the Encyclopedia of Genealogy at http://www.eogen.com/HeritageQuestOnline
