Universally Useful Genealogy Resources

General Searching:

http://familyhistorydaily.com/genealogy-help-and-how-to/free-genealogy-sites-all-usa-states/
This site gives a list of more sites that have genealogy resources for every U.S. State.

https://archive.org/details/genealogy
This is archive.org, an online archive with completely free content uploaded by a huge user base. Many genealogy books are self published to this site.

http://www.geocities.ws/archive/
An archive of Geocities websites that were saved before Geocities was shut down by yahoo.

http://home.rootsweb.ancestry.com/
Ancestry's free partner site. It has tons of websites and message boards within it and tons of information posted by a variety of people.

https://familysearch.org/
I have found family search, run by the LDS, to be most useful for finding photos. I was able to find photos of some family members

http://www.linkpendium.com/
Offers a search of over 2,000 user submitted genealogy websites. This one is mainly hit or miss. You might get lucky or you might not.

Newspaper Searches:


https://elephind.com/
Great for free newspaper searches. Most of the newspapers they have archived are for the U.S., but there are some for other countries as well.

http://www.legacy.com/
Free collection of obituaries, newspapers, and more in the U.S.

Google's free Newspaper Archive

List of online newspaper archives for every state in the USA.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Chronicling America offers newspapers from every U.S. State for free.



Specific Records:


List of U.S. Census forms and all their questions.

US Directory abbreviations:

http://www.genealogyintime.com/dictionaries/city-directory-abbreviations.html
The different abbreviations you will see in city directories and what they mean.

http://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/local-history-genealogy/2015/03/guide-to-city-directories-of-toronto-decoding-abbreviations.html
More abbreviations with some not included in the other list.

Getting help from other genealogists:


This is an invaluable resource that every genealogist should use. You simply post a question, or something about that brick wall you've been trying to knock down, and people on the site try and answer it for you, completely free. It doesn't completely replace the work of a professional genealogist, but I have seen dozens of success stories. People there will also perform tasks like translation and transcription of difficult fonts like kurrentschrift. The only thing you have to do is give back to the community. Post a link to something you found useful in your research or take translate requests in your own language. You could even find a document on a paid resource you are subscribed to for someone else on there. Its about giving back while accepting help from others.

Educational and Learning:

BYU free genealogy courses:

Useful for learning organization techniques and strategies for deriving information from a source.

This course is shorter than the others and consists of a 44 page pdf file that describes the organizational aspects of writing a family history as well as what you should and shouldn't include.

Occupation Specific:

Link to online railroad records for several U.S. States

Heraldry/Surnames:

There are a lot of issues with how family crests are normally presented, including the fact that 'family crest' is a misnomer. This website recognizes it as such and includes sources and interesting facts about the individuals who the crests originally belonged to. As far as heraldry websites go, its one of the best made/most factually interesting I've seen.




No comments:

Post a Comment