Get Thousands of Free Books on Genealogy

Face it...you don't really want thousands of free books, journals and magazines on genealogy.  But it's nice to know they are available online. And in that rich collection, there are likely to be a few real gems that are especially pertinent to your family's history, and that can shed light on who your ancestors were, and how they lived.

Here are some places to check out:

Google Books has a large collection of genealogy titles -- several thousand of them -- all available for immediate download and absolutely free.

From the "Genealogical history of the Quinby (Quimby) family 
in England and America" at Google Books.

If you don't feel like scrolling through thousands of texts (who would?), tinker with the search terms to narrow down the results.  For instance, here's a list of a few hundred free books on Pennsylvania genealogy that I created just by adding the state name to the search terms.  Using Google's intitle: syntax narrows the list even further by looking for terms only in the books' title, like these 26 books on family history in PA.

The Internet Archives, with several thousand free genealogy texts, is another great resource.  You even get little thumbnails of the books flashing through the pages.  Be aware, though, that searching here is much more clumsy than at Google Books, and there is a lot of duplication in the overall content.  Still...there are some treasures here you're not going to find elsewhere.

Speaking of clumsy searching, we now come to the 150+ collection of free family history books at the Making of America.  Lots of duplicates in the results list, and it takes time to browse through the resulting publications, but hopefully, you'll spot something useful here.

Lastly, there is the global search at Digital Book Index with about 100 free genealogy texts.  Enter genealogy in the 1st Word box, and genealogical as the 2nd Word and then Search to get results.


Visit the main page of Free Genealogy Tools for more, umm, free genealogical tools.

And don't forget to also check for your family history at Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.