books Archives - OnGenealogy

Family History Month Day 28 – HathiTrust Digital Library for Genealogy

The HathiTrust Digital Library is an online archive of content in and out of copyright. They receive content from Google, Internet Archive, Microsoft, and other partnering institutions. This is one of several digitized book sites that's useful for genealogy research. You can search for an ancestor by surname or by collections. Searches can be made by Material type (book, periodical, etc.) or Language (many languages) or year range. Search for family names, genealogies, city histories, or family interests, like "Loyalists", for leads on those hard to find ancestors. After your initial search results, be sure to start a further digital search within the book. A few helpful search tips: Use quotes to search for an exact phrase "James Webber" or "Webber, James". Use the wildcards * or ? to search for alternate spellings "James W?bb*". Use Boolean searches AND or OR (capitalized) to include or restrict search returns. Use a minus sign …

Internet Archive for Genealogy

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 sever…

Canadiana Discovery Portal for Genealogy

Candiana.ca has a free search engine for its digital collections from libraries, museums, and archives throughout Canada. Unlike Héritage which searches specific collections held at Library and Archives Canada, the Canadiana Discovery Portal searches over 40 partnering institutions with over 65 million pages. The Portal provides a wealth of free Canadian history online, including: books, journals, directories, newspapers, government documents, photographs, maps, and postcards. Canadiana Discovery Portal is a great resource for genealogists and family historians looking for primary source material and images related to Canadian history and many of the images are in the public domain and can be used freely. There will be a paywall for some of the search returns and after viewing the initial few pages of a document you may need to subscribe to Early Canadiana Online to have full access to the document, including the ability to download copies in PDF format. Subscrip…