PERSI and FindMyPast

We plan to visit the Allen County Library in Fort Wayne, IN this summer. I had hoped to produce a list of periodicals to use before we arrive at the library. FindMyPast has the PERSI (Periodical Source Index) and provides "free" access on their website. PERSI is an index to the extensive collection of magazines and newsletters held at the Allen County Library--the largest in the country.

However, what is available on FindMyPast is the title of an article, the name of the periodical and the year of issue. Without a subscription you cannot see the volume or number of the issue for an article, so it is impossible to order anything that seems interesting or to make a list ahead of time.

So I signed up for a month at FindMyPast in order to see more information. PERSI is most useful for location searches, but the website was not very efficient to use in preparation for a visit. There were a few articles that had been digitized, but even then there was no way to access a specific page in a periodical. It was too cumbersome to flip to page 55 to see a list of marriages for a certain county in New York, for example. Most articles are not digitized at this time.

We do have a PERSI CD that was produced by Ancestry with a publication date of 1997. It might still be useful, but no articles printed in the past twenty years would be included! It seems that we will have to wait until we arrive at the library to use the index efficiently.