Monthly Archives: October 2025

Trainings!

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We have had some great training opportunities so far this year. In April, Heather from Western Allegheny Community Library did a refresher on Hoopla for library staff. Heather went over some Hoopla basics but also touched on some lesser-known features.

In September, Mary Phillips and I did a deeper dive into BlueCareer and FinancialFit. Two of our newer resources. BlueCareer provides information on skilled trades and can connect patrons with trade schools, apprenticeship opportunities and even a simple, mobile-friendly want to connect with employers. FinancialFit offers short, easy-to-understand lessons and interactive tools to help develop and support basic financial literacy.

Rounding out this trio of trainings, in October, we had an excellent overview of Tutor.com by our Tutor.com Account manager. If you haven’t used Tutor.com in a while, it’s worth a revisit. They’ve updated the interface and added in a new suite of tutoring options for Career and Technical Education (CTE) services.

These three trainings are available on the Training Resources tab here on the Backstage. If you have any problems accessing a training, please email me or sent me a message on Teams.

-Hilary Lewis, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

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Family History Month with Ancestry.com

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October is Family History Month, which makes it the perfect time to begin researching your family’s heritage using Ancestry.com. 

The database, available for in-library use, allows users to search census records, birth, marriage & death records, military records, newspapers, and other documents. There are billions of records available to search from all over the world. 

To get started, click Begin Searching, then enter in as much information as you can about your relative. 

The results will return a variety of formats, and numerous results that meet the criteria that you entered.

If the results that appear are not what you’re looking for, you can narrow down your search by using the filters along the side. These allow you to specify the document type that you are interested in, the location of the record(s), and the date that the records are from.

Some records have a family tree attached to them which can lead to other family members. This is not available for all records. Ancestry does allow for some documents to be printed, such as family trees and Census records. For others, printing of the original document is not available, instead users can get a print out of the information that was featured on the document.

Happy searching!

Erin, Bridgeville Public Library

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