On Day 9 of Family History Month, go see what’s new at Internet Archive.

 

Internet Archive (archive.org NOT to be confused with the subscription genealogy site, archives.com) is a great free resource for genealogy and family history. It’s a “non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.”

 

The Internet Archive library offers over 20 million fully digitized books and texts. And the OpenLibrary has over 2.3 million modern eBooks that can be downloaded. *If you’re going to type in the url instead of hitting a link, remember it’s “archive.ORG”.

• You can Search by Collection, if you know a particular library, say Brigham Young University Library or the Allen County Public Library, has great genealogical holdings. There are over 4,000 collections so unless you’re going for something specific, you might not want to limit your search this way.

• They have a specific collection: Genealogy, that pulls resources from several different institutions.

• You can look at the Microfilm Collection within the Genealogy collection.

• They have nearly 4,000 Compiled histories/Family Genealogies in their Family Genealogy Collection.

• The Wayback Machine has over 619 billion pages of archive internet websites if you try to find a site that’s down-look up the URL in the Wayback Machine and you might find what you need. Note: some websites specifically prohibit crawling and won’t be archived here.

• And you can create your own free account and archive your family papers here!

 

I like to do repeat searches for county and town histories, genealogies, and surnames at Internet Archive. They are continually growing their collection so it pays to search their site every few months. Best in your research, whether it’s fee or free! Save

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