The Livermore-Amador Genealogical Society celebrated its eleventh birthday this year [1988]. For the last ten of those years our club has enjoyed the benefits of a lively, helpful newsletter, The Livermore Roots Tracer.

Unlike most genealogical publications, The Tracer has never been indexed, except for a surname-only index at the end of the first year. Many genealogists are index-spoiled - if a book doesn't have an index, they disdain to pick it up. We admit to that behavior. So we have been bothered over the years that our own club's publication might be losing readership, or might be less useful than it could be, because it lacks an index.

It seemed fitting to us to memorialize the tenth anniversary of The Tracer with an index. Specifically, we have attempted to produce a full-name citation for every occurrence of every name in all of the issues published to date. We may have missed a few names, and may have misspelled a few, but we have tried hard for completeness and accuracy. The only names intentionally omitted were those, and there are thousands of them, in the survey of Livermore cemeteries. This survey has been reprinted in full, with index, in the recent LAGS book, Livermore Cemeteries (1988), available for purchase from LAGS. To locate the original survey as published in The Roots Tracer, see the entries under "cemeteries: list of burials in Livermore cemeteries" in our subject index.

Our subject index will help a reader locate major articles on topics of interest, but will not by any means lead him to every mention of that topic. We have excluded many subjects: LAGS business, such as election of officers, plans for fundraising, etc.; news from other societies, unless it contained substantial reference-quality information; book-acquisition lists from our library (but note that the authors of these books are all listed in the name index); and reviews of books in which the main subject is people, not places or things. The main limitation of the subject index is that it does not reference every mention of a subject. For example, there are probably hundreds of occurrences of the word "Germany" in The Tracer - in book titles, in "Meet the Members" biographies, in ancestor charts, in queries, in notes from conferences - but we have cited only those places where a substantial amount of timeless information about Germany is given. One way to look at this limitation is to recognize that there is still a wealth of unindexed information to be gained by browsing.

We now present our gift indexes, and wish The Livermore Roots Tracer a Happy Anniversary!

George and Harriet Anderson
August 5, 1988

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