Genealogy and Family History

You can do some searching for free on this site before you need to pay. The newspaper resources are especially helpful. There is some overlap with Ancestry.com, so if you are considering getting a subscription to genealogybank make sure that the items you are interested in are not on Ancestry.com. There’s no point paying twice for the same thing. That said, there is a lot of great material on this site.

This is a very useful site that should provide you with lots of leads. It indicates which of the resources it is guiding you to are free and which ones (designated $) you will need to pay for.

This site will do just what it promises. It is a “gateway” that will help you find links to “name” societies, local record holdings, etc.. It is free, and it is definitely worth investigating.

This is the website of the National Archives. There are no on-line databases. (You will need to use the for-pay site, Footnote, if you want to download images.) However, NARA does offer a lot of very useful “how to” information.

This site is free. What makes it so useful is that it is an excellent “gateway.” It has many, many links to other sites.

This is worth looking at if you are interested in California. Just search on Vitalsearch and then follow directions. This is a “for pay” site. “Premium” users get to access a lot of the databases. However, you can register for free as a “Guest” and get limited (but still useful) access. You will get as your username vitalguest and as your password enjoy

Chicago’s famed Newberry Library has an excellent Genealogy page which will link you to all sorts of sources. Obviously the majority of the links relate to Illinois, but there are others for Missouri, Texas, Michigan, and even Massachusetts.

This will help you determine which states have which resources, where to send for copies of original records, etc. Again it will tell you what is free and what is not.

The Illinois State Archives has not digitized material, but it has a great many indexes on-line. Search on Illinois State Archives and follow directions.

The Massachusetts State Archives website has useful hints and thumbnail descriptions of collections. No downloadable images, though.

If you are looking for anyone from Missouri you should look at the website the Missouri State Archives has set up. The staff has been busily digitizing a wide array of materials, including death records for the entire state (up to 1959) and probate records from St. Louis. Just search on Missouri State Archives. We will be using material from this site later in the semester.

New Jersey’s on-line archives contain quite a lot of useful information, and if you think you have relatives from the Garden State it is worth your while to check out this site.

Nutrias, the website for the city of New Orleans, can help out with leads if you are looking for people in the Big Easy.

Don’t be put off by the “postcard” format. Enter the site. It contains some great (and easily searchable) newspaper material.

The South Carolina State Archives has put a lot of its indexes on-line. You can search to be sure that there are records available before you actually send for (and pay for) a copy of the document you want.

If you want to see what British resources might be available you should check out this site. The indexes are searchable, but you will need to buy credits if you want to download anything.

Your immigrant ancestors could well have come to the U.S. via Canada. Check out this website if you think that’s a possibility. Unfortunately, relatively few of the records are searchable via name of immigrant. You have to have a rough idea of the year and/or name of vessel. One exception is the LI-RA-MA collection, which contains records of Jews, Ukrainians and Finns who sought help from the offices of the Tsarist Russian Empire in Canada.

You can do some basic searching for free, and then you will need to purchase “credits.” There is a lot on this site, though, and you can return without charge to anything you have searched and downloaded.

A for-pay site, but the cost is reasonable (about $20 for a year’s subscription), and certainly worthwhile if you are looking for anyone from England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand…in fact, anywhere with strong British ties. You are almost guaranteed to find a cousin or two.

Genuki will let you see what individual counties across the U.K. have in their county records offices.

This is another of those sites that will allow you to do some basic searching for free before requiring you to purchase credits. It contains departure records from British ports to ports all over the world from 1890 to 1960. Remember that your ancestor might not have been British, but he or she might have visited Britain or come from somewhere else in Europe and shipped out to the U.S. via a British port.

As you know, not many of the records of the Massachusetts State Archives are searchable on-line. One that is – although admittedly it is a “work in progress – is the Passenger Manifest Index for the port of Boston from 1848 to 1891.

This site is free. If you think you might be looking for people who came to this country via New York (and there were many other ports of arrival), start searching.

This site is free. If you think you might be looking for people who came to this country via New York (and there were many other ports of arrival), start searching.

This site will not allow you to search names, but it will give you a sense of how many ports of entry there were in the 19th and early 20th centuries and which ones have records available. It will explain how to access those records, which ones are free, and which ones require payment.

Although this can be rather temperamental, don’t give up on it. It’s a useful supplement to findagrave.

Did you find in the census or in one of the other sources you looked at a job title that simply made no sense to you? Check this site. It has descriptions of all sorts of archaic and arcane jobs.

If you are trying to figure out what your ancestor’s name actually translated to, this is the site to consult. It looks a little off-putting, but spend a minute or two figuring it out and the effort will be worth it. Try looking, for instance, at Jiri. Your great-great-grandfather from Bohemia would have been George in the U.S.

You don’t have to be looking for a famous person to get lots of useful information from this site. It’s free, and we know that free is good. It’s also a very well-organized site.

This is a site you need to play with. It was put together by the Economic History Association, and it will help you figure out what something was worth in U.S. dollars and British pounds over the centuries.

Similar to How Much Is That?. Find out what that $37.92 left to your great-great-grandmother in 1872 is worth today!

A free site, and one that can guide you to a lot of social history (esp. 18th century). The Old Bailey is Britain’s central criminal court. You can find out if someone you are looking for was charged with a crime, was a crime victim, a witness, or a juror.