Scanning all the Society’s publications has been a project on the back burner for years. With the recent downsizing of the library space it has become a necessity to reclaim the space that boxes of old Journals occupied. The Society still has paper copies, both with the Historian and bound, on the library shelves. But now for substantially less than the purchase of a few paper copies you can have 40 years of Journals. All files are saved as PDF files.
Scanning and index by Guy Bierman.
Find it in the BCGS Store.
Viewing these PDF documents requires Adobe Reader. If you do not have Adobe Reader, you may download it FREE here.
I have uncovered the Society’s first publication and will reproduce at the end of this preface. Early Journals were also issued every month. I have saved them as four volumes per year, as is the current practice.
Technology in 1980 to reproduce a newsletter usually involved a mimeograph machine, messy tubes of ink, strange stencil sheets and a typewriter. As mentioned in the early Journals, the editor struggled with getting good copies. The Society eventually had the Journals “professionally printed,” but the preparation of the original was still in house on that same typewriter. The printing was done by a shop on an early copier machine using that new-fangled Xerox process. You will see the early Journals suffered with missed letters, soft strikes and double strikes. The Society newsletter was first called the Journal with Volume 3. The Branches was introduced in the Fall of 1988. I’m also surprised of the use of small fonts. Lots of #8 font and even a few examples of #6 font. Thank goodness Adobe Reader has a zoom feature.
I would suggest you transfer the Journal files to your hard drive for quicker access. Save the USB drive as a backup. Or you could back up the files by whatever method you use and use the USB for other purposes.
Scanning and index by Guy Bierman.
Find it in the BCGS Store.
The society publishes Journal of the Berks County Genealogical Society, a scholarly quarterly journal edited by Laurel Miller.
This is a chronological index of the articles published in the Journal since 1986. Browse through the index. If you find an article of interest to you, print out a Journal Order Form. PDF versions of back issues of the Journal are available to members for only $1.00.