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General Resources
The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites
FamilySearch.org
Premium free source of millions of worldwide genealogy records and fully digitized books, sign in but use it for free.
Cyndi’s List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet
A categorized and cross-referenced list of links for genealogical research. The site contains roughly 332,000 links in more than 200 groups.
Daughters of the American Revolution
Use the DAR’s Genealogical Research System for information on lineage and other resources for early Americans, not just patriots, that have been carefully vetted for accuracy.
Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter
Learn the latest genealogy news here on this quality online genealogy newsletter.
National Archives for Genealogists
Find how to get military records, passenger lists and many more federal records that will be essential for your genealogy research. Learn more about U.S. Census records.
National Genealogical Society
Find free tools for your research as well as membership information, access to courses and trips and a bookstore.
New England Historic and Genealogical Society
Try their free learning resources, get membership information, and subscribe to the free Weekly Genealogist.
USGenWeb Project
Provides a link to each state in the United States and from each state’s website to every county in the United States. Many have active volunteers who work to monitor, create and provide local information for genealogical research.
HeritageQuest – HeritageQuest Online contains essential collections of genealogical and historical sources with coverage dating back to the 1700s.
Oral History Association– Oral History Best Practices
Reclaim the Records– Reclaim The Records is an activist group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and journalists. We work to identify important genealogical record sets that are not online anywhere and not broadly available to the public. We then use state Freedom of Information laws to force government agencies and archives to hand over copies of these records to the public, which we then digitize and put online for free use.
Traditional Nicknames in Old Documents
A comprehensive list of nicknames used in old documents.
African American Resources
Federal Records that Help Identify Former Enslaved People and Slave Holders
The U.S. Government, holds a variety of records that can help African-Americans successfully identify slave owners and ancestors who were enslaved before 1865.
Freedmen’s Bureau: Established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865 the Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing, and medicine.
International African American Museum– The IAAM’s Center for Family History’s growing digital African American archive collection features primary source material by, from, and about the African American community spanning the colonial era of the Americas through the 20th Century. The digital resources below contain a variety of unique and previously unpublished artifacts such as African American military records, family photographs, and funeral programs. While the following list is not exhaustive, archival additions in the near future will include oral histories, slavery-era documents, as well as marriage, death, and birth records.
Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware – Listing of free African Americans in the Southeast during the colonial period extracted from primary source materials.
Slave Voyages – Information on over 35,000 slaving voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866, manipulatable into maps, timelines, tables, and graphs. Includes African Names Database, recommended websites, essays to provide context, and images (manuscripts, places, slaves, and vessels).
Slave Era Insurance Policy Information
Documented insurance coverage for slaveholders. The records can be searched by both slave and slaveholder name, images of the policy documents are included.
The Library of Congress’ Chronicling America has digitized many African American newspapers from across the country.
Low Country Africana offers resources like plantation records and voter registrations for those with roots in South Carolina, Florida, or Georgia.
Unknown No Longer is a database of Virginia Slave Names with biographical details from unpublished manuscripts at the Virginia Historical Society. There are records for both free and enslaved people.
Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy: 1719-1820
This web site provides a searchable database for African-Americans from the Louisiana area.
Alabama African American Genealogy Research
A comprehensive list of all Alabama genealogy resources. This web site provides a complete and easily navigable list of important records and databases.
Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System
This National Park Service web site includes information on the more than 230,000 African-American troops who served in the Civil War.
Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society
AAHGS was founded in 1977 in Washington, DC by a small group of historians and genealogists who felt a need to share resources and methodology for pursuing historical and genealogical research.
AfriGeneas is a site devoted to African American genealogy. It is particularly helpful for researching African Ancestry in the Americas as well as for general genealogical research and resources. It is also an African Ancestry research community featuring the AfriGeneas mailing list, message boards and genealogy chats.
Compiles Black History and resources for getting started with African American genealogy.
Death Records
Find a Grave
170 million grave records representing 491,973 cemeteries in over 241 countries. You may find an obituary, family tree and connections to families.
Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records U.S.
Find here a directory of links to websites with online U.S. death indexes, listed by state and county. Included are death records, death certificate indexes, death notices and registers, obituaries, wills and probate records, and cemetery burials.
Digital Books
Internet Archive
This San Francisco-based nonprofit digital library provides free public access to millions of public domain books and other digitized materials. Books are fully searchable and can be read using flip page animation. Many historical and genealogy books can be downloaded.
Google Books
Formerly, Google Book Search and Google Print, it searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to, and stored in its digital database.
Hathi Trust
A collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries, Google Books, Internet Archive, other libraries and individuals.
American History and Genealogy Project
The American History and Genealogy Project website links to genealogy books that are digitized or transcribed and have been placed online for public viewing.
Immigration
Ellis Island and Port of New York Passenger Arrival Records
The Port of New York Passenger Records 1820 – 1957 contains the passenger lists of almost 65 million immigrants, passengers, and crew members who came through Ellis Island and the Port of New York from 1820 to 1957. Tip! Use One-Step Search Tools.
Immigrant Ship Transcriber’s Guild
Includes sites to research immigration, emigration, and naturalization, passenger lists, and much more.
One-Step Search Tools
Use Morse’s handy tools for a better search result on the Ellis Island website and find dozens of other tools for researching passenger records, census records, and vital records.
Land Records
The Official Federal Land Records Site
This site gives “access to Federal land conveyance records for the Public Land States. There is also image access to more than five million Federal land title records for Eastern Public Land States, issued between 1820 and the present. Find homestead records here.
Newspapers
Google Newspaper Archive
Browsable historical newspaper archives dating back over 200 years from around the world.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Digital Collections holds U.S. newspapers, documents and photographs. Genealogy Reference Services can be found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/
Newspaper Archives Online List on Wikipedia
This site provides a list with links arranged by Country and for the United States a state by state sub list of both free and pay wall blocked online newspaper archives.
California Digital Newspaper Collection
It contains over 400,000 pages of significant historical California newspapers published from 1846-1922, including California’s first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California.
Military
Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System
Find information about those who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Other information on the site includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records, which will be amended over time.
Fold3 – Fold3 Library Edition by Ancestry provides convenient access to US military records, including the stories, photos, and personal documents of the men and women who served.
Video Training
African American Genealogy: Getting Past the 1870 Brick Wall by Janice Gilyard
African American Genealogy Research Tips by Sherman McRae
African American Genealogy Challenges by Shelley Viola Murphy
USCT Pension Files: A Rich Resource for African American Genealogy, Part 1 of 2
USCT Pension Files: A Rich Resource for African American Genealogy, Part 2 of 2
