Free Genealogy Tools

Free Help for the National Archives -- Know Your Records

2012-01-14T10:43:00.005-05:00

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC

Usually, here at FreeGenealogyTools, we're highlighting digital resources you can access for free.

Today, we (and I'm using the royal we...it's really just me) are turning the tables a bit. The Know Your Records (KYR) program at the National Archives is asking for some free help from you.

KYR is a pretty cool program of seminars, newsletters and other outreach activities designed to introduce history researchers to the amazing collections at the National Archives. Most of KYR's activities have only been available in the Washington DC area. Now, KYR wants to put some of its videos online. Their genealogy lectures -- they've hosted hundreds over the years -- have covered topics like:

Access to Archival Databases (AAD) for Genealogists
Passport Applications, 1795–1925
Alien Files (A-Files) for Genealogy Research
The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company: A Gold Mine for Black and White Genealogists
World War II Finding Aid
Documenting Death in the Civil War

Good stuff! They even have specialty sessions on using Ancestry.com and other commercial family history resources that include NARA records.

Anyway, KYR wants your vote! Let NARA know which presentations you'd most like to see posted online at YouTube and iTunes U. Your votes will determine what new videos get posted...but you don't have to wait to get the flavor of what's available. A few KYR videos are already online at YouTube:

Have fun.

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.

Get Ready For the 1940 Census

2011-12-06T22:34:00.001-05:00

Pie Town, New Mexico in the 1940s

The Wells Fargo wagon isn't the only thing that's a'coming.

The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) will publicly release the 1940 Census records on April 2, 2012.

The 1940 Census will be available online. But it won't be searchable by name, at least not at the outset. Scuttlebutt has it that the National Archives will eventually provide name search capability. Even if they don't, I'm sure Ancestry.com will have it up and running in fairly short order.

But for starters, the only online option is to browse the 1940 Census according to what the Census Bureau calls enumeration districts, which are essentially the territory covered by a single census taker. If you know a person's address in 1940, you can figure out their enumeration district and peruse the relevant Census forms.

It's not necessarily easy, but it's not too difficult either. NARA has a detailed set of instructions for locating the 1940 enumeration district using Archive records. They also offer a description of the information available from 1940 Census forms, along with a page of FAQs about the 1940 Census.

Steve Morse, one of the gurus of online genealogy, has created several helpful online tools for tracking down the proper enumeration district.

I hope your breath is appropriately bated, as this will be one huge new data source for family history researchers.

Have fun.

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.

The Wacky World of the Internet Archive

2011-11-18T22:45:00.001-05:00

There are oodles of war records at the Internet Archvie

The Internet Archive is a wonderful-yet-peculiar hodgepodge of digital materials, including many thousands of items under the heading, Genealogy.

You'll find a little bit of everything here. Census records, military musters, court filings, ship manifests, old newspapers, family histories, vital records...etc, etc.

Some of the material is full-text searchable, some of it is image only. I haven't found a single comprehensive index of what's available, and the materials themselves aren't always well-described. Here's the master list of the available genealogy categories:

United States Census -- 23,614 items
Records of military units in volunteer Confederate organizations -- 536 items
Records of military units in volunteer Union organizations -- 225 items
Eastern Cherokee applications of the U.S. Court of Claims -- 348 items
Family Genealogies -- 1,805 items
Family History Book Collection -- 436 items
Passenger and Crew Vessel Lists for New York, NY 1897-1957 -- 7,128 items
Passenger Lists of Vessels for Baltimore and Philadelphia 636 items
Passengers arriving in the St. Albans, VT District 1,027 items
Passport Applications, 1795-1905 - 694 items
Records of the Cotton Bureau, Confederate War Department 53 items
Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands -- 453 items
Records relating to War of 1812 -- 454 items
Registers of Births -- 3,139 items
Veterans Administration Pension Payment Cards 2,544 items
United States Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes -- 494 items
War Records -- 44 items

There are some unusual materials here, including several Indian and African-American histories. And don't think these are all U.S. materials as there are quite a number of resources from other countries and in several non-English languages.

This is a resource to browse and explore. Your odds are pretty good that you'll come across something that's relevant to your own family history quest.

If you find a needle in the Internet Archive haystack, let us know by leaving a comment.

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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.

Limited Time Offer...Free Access to (Some of) Ancestry.com

2011-08-30T19:23:00.002-04:00

It's not like me to reproduce a press release, but I'll make an exception in this case, since it comes from Ancestry.com and offers (briefly!) some free access to an important genealogy tool. So, without further ado...

ANCESTRY.COM OFFERS FREE ACCESS

TO IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION RECORDS

Week of Free Access Enables Families

to Discover Stories of Ancestors

International Travels and Passage

PROVO, UTAH (August 29, 2011) Ancestry.com, the world?s largest online family history resource, today announced an entire week of free access to its popular U.S. and International Immigration and Naturalization records. The free access week begins August 29th and runs through the Labor Day holiday ending September 5th. During this time, all visitors to Ancestry.com will be able to search for free the indices and images of new and updated U.S. immigration records as well as selected international immigration records from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden and Mexico. Millions of Americans can trace their family history to other countries, and these collections provide valuable information about the travels and journeys that brought them to America or other countries around the world.

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Tracking Down Veterans

2010-12-12T19:27:00.001-05:00

The VA can help track down veterans.

A veteran may be the key to unlocking some of your family history. Perhaps a soldier is a long-last family member. Or a veteran may have served with your grandfather, father, brother or uncle (or grandmother, mother, sister or aunt) and have information that can help fill in the details of your family tree.

The problem, of course, is finding a veteran whose name doesn't show up in the phone book or any other of the usual people-find resources.

The Department of Veterans Affairs can help! Write a letter to the veteran you want to contact. Then write a seperate note to the VA explaining who you want to contact -- name, branch (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force), unit and any other information you have. If they have an address on file, Veterans Affairs will forward your letter to the veteran in question.

With luck, the soldier gets back in touch with you, and your investigation begins.

P.S. And, of course, you can use this to find buddies you served with, even if genealogy isn't the reason.

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.

The History of Housekeeping

2010-11-17T18:08:00.000-05:00

Family Saying Grace, by Anthonius Claeissins

Old & Interesting is a not very old website, but it is rather interesting.

It bills itself as a site about the "history of domestic paraphernalia". It is all about how people have kept house through the ages, using everyday items that we now think of as antiques, if we think of them at all.

If you want to build a mental picture of how your ancestors cooked, cleaned themselves, cleaned their clothes, cleaned their homes, made the beds, kept warm, and stored food then this is the site for you.

There's a whole page on the History of Ironing Boards!

And if you're interested in historical oddities, like cooking without fire or 14th century baby walkers, then you'll also find Old & Interesting an informative and entertaining site.

Even if it's just to explore some of the wonderful images and uncluttered prose, this site is well-worth a good explore.

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.

Historical State Census Records

2010-11-12T17:09:00.003-05:00

Some sort of strange census machine
(photo courtesy of Marcin Wichary, CC-BY)

I'm guessing that the plural of census is either the awkward-sounding censuses or the pretentious-sounding censii, but I'm too lazy to look it up, so I'll just roll with census records.

There are a ton and a half of state census records available online, mostly name searchable and all free of charge. Some records go back right to the days when the state was first settled, others focus on particular sub-populations like Indians or war widows and, of course, many are general census records for the entire population.

Without further ado:

The Kansas Historical Society Name Index includes the 1895 state census, and a bunch of other good stuff, including a directory, of sorts, of pioneer women.

Free Military Records For Veterans' Day

2010-11-10T19:36:00.002-05:00

A determined World War II infantryman.

Wouldn't it be nice to get free access to three centuries of American military records with more than 100 million names on file.

Of course it would. And now you can, for a few days, at least. In honor of Veteran's Day, the entire military collection at Ancestry.com is available free of charge between November 11 and November 14. Just head to their site and click on See all Military Records to dive in.

Want to see George Custer's or William Tecumseh Sherman's hand-written application letters to West Point? They're there! Looking to explore family history from the Revolutionary War, Civil War or any of the other conflicts that have involved United States fighting forces? This is the place to do it and, for a few days, anyway, do it at no charge.

A very happy and proud Veteran's Day to all.

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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.

A Good Freebie from Ancestry.com

2010-11-05T22:42:00.001-04:00

You're all familiar with Ancestry.com, no doubt, the biggest, baddest online source of family history information in the universe.

It's a subscription service, and we don't do fee-based sources here at Free Genealogy Tools. But there's a good deal of free content that Ancestry.com has made available.

One of my favs is Ancestry Magazine, a print magazine that ran for 25 years before it ceased publication in 2009. A lot of the content is available online, and there's some awfully good material here, like the list of the Top 300 Genealogy Sources at home, in public records and online.

Here's part of the Top 300 list: things you ought not overlook in your family papers:

Address books
Adoption papers
Application copies (for jobs, schools, organizations)
Autobiographies
Autograph albums
Awards
Baby books
Baptism/christening records
Bibles
Biographies and biographical sketches
Birth certificates
Birthday books
Cassette tapes, DVDs, and videos of family members
Cemetery deeds
Christmas letters
Citizenship/naturalization papers
Contracts
Death certificates
Deeds
Diaries
Diplomas
Embroidery
Employment records
Family e-mails
Family histories
Family newsletters
Family tree charts
Funeral books and records
GEDCOMs/family trees
Journals
Heirlooms
Home computers
Hospital records
Insurance papers
Jewelry with engravings, insignias, or photos
Leases
Letters (old and recent)
Letters of administration
Licenses
Marriage certificates (civil and religious)
Marriage licenses
Medals and trophies
Membership cards, papers, pins, insignias
Memorial cards
Military records and certificates
Missionary records
Newspaper clippings
Obituaries
Online sources including message boards
Passports
Pension records
Photographs
Postcards
Resumes
School records
Scrapbooks
Service medals
Social Security cards
Tax returns
Telegrams
Titles to homes, cars, etc.
Traditions/family stories
Wedding invitations
Wills

I'm sure there's at least ONE item on there that you hadn't thought about, eh?

The wonderful magazine collection at Google Books also has old issues of Ancestry Magazine going back to 1994.

Worth a look.

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 NewspaperArchive.com. This is a subscription database, but it's one of the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Cyndi's List

2010-10-16T20:09:00.002-04:00

Cyndi's List covers pretty much the whole planet.

I've written about hundreds of free genealogy resources on the internet, but somehow never got around to mentioning Cyndi's List before today. Time to rectify that oversight.

Cyndi Howells started up Cyndi's List in 1996 with (if memory serves) a few hundred links to genealogy sites. Her site has now grown to more than a quarter of a million links, with dozens added every week.

Of course, a site with hundreds of thousands of links has all the makings of a genealogical nightmare, but Cyndi does an excellent job of categorizing and sub-categorizing the links in a way that makes it an easy resource to use.

You can browse Cyndi's List by country or region, such as the 3,149 links for Cymru aka Wales. You can also browse by:

Type of Resource, like Oral History
Ethnic Origins such as Native American
Specialty categories like Orphans
Tools such as People Search Resources

There's even a category for Outer Space genealogy...really!

Cyndi's List is a not-to-be-missed site for family history research. I'm especially fond of the What's New section, where I always come across something that I just didn't know about, even though I'm one of those types who thinks he knows everything.

Thanks, Cyndi, for a terrific resource.

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.

May I Introduce Mr. and Mrs. Fools, and Their Daughter, April

2010-03-31T16:50:00.004-04:00

Someone, either a poet or a tax protester, once said that April is the cruelest month, and so it may be (though I'm rather fond of it myself).

But could anyone have really been so cruel as to name their daughter April, when their family name is Fool?

Ms. April Fool, are you out there?

Apparently so.

The family name of Fool or Fools, while not terribly common, is not unheard of, either. It may be a variant spelling of Fowles, and names of that ilk, but whatever its origins, there is no shortage of Fools out there in the world.

But really now...April Fools?

According to Intelius, one of the most comprehensive public record lookups, there are three April Fools in the US (in Ohio, Illinois and Minnesota), along with two women named April Fool, one in New York and one in Nebraska (I'm assuming April is a girl's name...no one would be so cruel as to name their son April!).

The Nebraska Ms. Fool has a relative by the name of Ima Fool, indicating a family with a sense of humor, or (more likely) someone filed a phoney form down at the local DMV.

The sounds-like search at Ancestry.com offers up a few variations on the name, including April Fewell, April Foil, and April Foyil.

From FamilySearch and other data bases come other variations: April Fauls, April Fowles, April Falls, April Foiles, April Fulce, and April Fales. And let us not overlook Miss May Foole.

There are many other families in history who could have given rise to an April Fool, but apparently chose not to (or at least, didn't leave a record behind), including:

Charles Fool-Bear, and other assorted foolish animals: Foolbull, Foolscrow, and Fool Hawk, among them.
According to CWSS, Dick Fool wore the Grey, and James Fool the Blue in the Civil War.
Bepiah B. Foolchand once walked the earth, as did Mohssen Fooladjoush, Charles Foolkroynik and Edith Fooler.
There's someone named Gold Fool and another named Fishin Fools.
And according to Forces Reunited, there was once a British Soldier with the unlikely name of Tycloldicafoolo.

However, according to the Canadian Genealogy Centre, there are no Fools in Canada.

And no...I'm not fooling!

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.

Is Frank Sinatra in Your Family Tree?

2010-03-21T20:51:00.001-04:00

Today's Free Genealogy Tool is an unusual one. Your mirror.

Go on, take a look. Do you see a pair of blue eyes looking back at you? If you do, then you're related to Frank Sinatra -- Ol' Blue Eyes himself.

Genetic researchers, back in 2008, published a ground-breaking paper showing that all blue-eyed people are descendants of a blue-eyed common ancestor. What's more, the blue-eyed branch of the human family is a fairly new development, from a genetic point of view, arising perhaps as recently as 6,000 years ago.

The blue-eyed mutation arose in Europe, possibly in the area of Afghanistan. Prior to that time, scientists theorize that all humans had brown eyes.

Of course, six millennia is a good stretch of time, so your relation to someone else with blue eyes is likely to be many, many times removed. Still...there's some sort of family connection there. If you see a fellow blue-eyed person, feel free to call him or her cousin.

You can read more about it in this nice write-up in USA Today on blue-eyed genealogy.

Or if you prefer, you can dive into the original paper itself, though it's really only for hard core geneticists. Just look for the one with the title: Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression.

Sinatra not your type? If you prefer, you blue-eyed types are also related to Brad Pitt. And Marie Curie. And Paul Newman. And...

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.

Historical Phone Books from East Europe

2010-03-15T10:02:00.000-04:00

The good old phone book can be a genealogist's best friend. Telephone directories provide a detailed name and address listing (and phone number, of course). But beyond that, collections of phone books can bracket how long a person lived at a particular address, showing when their listing first appears, when it changes to a new address, and when it eventually disappears, as an ancestor moves out of town, or out of country, or passes on.

The Library of Congress has a wonderful hard-copy collection of European directories, largely focused on the decades just before and after WWII.

A few of their phone books from Eastern Europe have been digitized, and are fully available online:

Bulgaria: Directories for 1917, 1919, 1945 and 1947 are available. These include various combinations of individual and business listings, as well as government officials. There are also sections with maps, photographs, information on royal families, and so on. Text is in Bulgarian and German.
Poland: The Library has a 1923 business directory, as well as a 1939 directory of residential and business listings for Warsaw and the surrounding areas.
Romania: This is the largest online collection of phone books, with intermittent coverage from 1923-1970. The books chiefly focus on the area around Bucharest, though there are listings for the rest of Romania as well.

Telephone books being what they are, these tend to be very large files if you try to download the entire directory. However, the LoC makes the directories available in a page viewer that allows you to flip through the content without having to download the entire volume. Very handy.

Looking for more historical directories? Check out the online collection at the Genealogy Indexer, which covers mostly Eastern Europe, but has a bit of material from the UK, France, and South America as well.

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.

A Very Useful Irish Family History Page

2010-02-24T21:15:00.000-05:00

The Primary Valuation of Ireland 1848-1864 at Ulster Ancestry is not quite a census of 19th-century Ireland, but it's close.

This country-wide survey of property owners and households in Ireland was undertaken (of course) to determine who owed how much in terms of taxes. It is also known as Griffith's Valuation, after Sir Richard Griffith, who directed the whole effort.

The look-up at Ulster Ancestry requires entering a full or partial surname of the person you're looking for, along with the County in which they lived.

Search results provide first and last name, along with the Townland (a uniquely Irish jurisdiction, I believe, with great names like Drumreagh Otra), and Parish, along with the County name.

It's a handy, pretty easy look-up to use, and worth an explore, even with the fairly limited information that's provided with the free interface.

Also have a look at the other free Irish family history resources available here, including:

Old Irish Names History
1609 Pardon List
Mayflower Passenger List 1620
Passenger Lists
Censuses and Rent Rolls

and a fair number of other resources as well.

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.

NARA Naturalization Records

2010-02-15T12:53:00.003-05:00

A little-known genealogical dataset from the National Archives and Records Administration is the group of NARA naturalization record indexes that are available online, covering a period from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.

These are name indexes, rather than actual records themselves. They are neither huge nor comprehensive, but for those with family roots in the covered geographical areas, they are a useful resource.

The records generally show names, dates, and country of origin, and sometimes include very useful aka remarks, such as the alternative surnames shown here:

Ditondo Angela 6/23/1936 Italy aka Angela Yeradi, Ieradi

The largest name index looks to be for naturalization records from St. Paul Minnesota and surroundings. You'll find a lot of Scandinavian, Prairie Home Companion-sounding names here, like Odmund, Herm, and Erithjof, along with a large number of European names, and smaller numbers from all over the world.

There are other online name indexes for:

In addition to the name indexes, there are a small number of actual naturalization records from NARA available online, includuing declarations of intention (to become naturalized as a U.S. citizen) and petitions for naturalization requesting citizenship.

Head to the Naturalization Page of ARC (the Archival Research Catalog) and click on a country of interest to see the actual records available. Take note of the ARC search terms that are automatically used, as you can easily modify these to fine-tune the search, or to look for specific names.

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.

For finding someone, Intelius is the best people-search service on the web (but I'd suggest steering clear of their 'special offers').

Keep an Eye on TinEye

2010-02-09T22:30:00.001-05:00

So, you're searching on the internet, looking into your family's past, and all of a sudden you come across an interesting old photograph:

a street scene that just may be from the town where your great grandparents lived
an image of a faded and hard to read birth certificate
or best of all, a portrait of someone who, quite possibly, is directly in your family line.

Trouble is, there's not much information accompanying the photo, and you're really not sure where it came from or what it shows. How can you find out more about it?

One very neat tool for checking further is called TinEye, a self-proclaimed reverse image search engine.

This is a very cool tool. TinEye will quickly spool through more than a billion images in its collection to see if it can find a duplicate of the picture you need more information about. If it does, it directs you to the websites where those duplicates can be found, and with a bit of luck, to more information about the provenance of the photographs.

Let's take the photo I ran with the FGT post, What's in a Place Name. Suppose you came across that image, and wanted to know more about it. There's not much information about the picture on FGT itself. But a quick TinEye search uncovers six sites carrying the exact same photograph, including the Library of Congress site that is the original source of the photo.

Russell Lee. School children singing. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940.
Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-372. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34151. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of CongressRussell Lee. School children singing. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940. Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-372. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34151. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Not bad, eh?

By the way, TinEye isn't a face recognition program. It won't find different photos with the same people. Instead, it's designed for one task...to find copies of the same photograph in other places around the web.

TinEye is still a pretty young site. It searches through more than a billion photos, but that's actually only a small chunk of what the web has to offer. Give it a try, and definitely add it to your Favorites for checking back as its collection grows larger.

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.

For finding someone, Intelius is the best people-search service on the web (but I'd suggest steering clear of their 'special offers').

Black History Month and Beyond

2010-02-05T12:40:00.005-05:00

This being Black History Month (in the US and Canada...Britain waits until October!), I thought I'd dig through my notes on some of the lesser-known resources available for African-American genealogy.

Don't be fooled into thinking these sources are only of use for black family history. Where there were black slaves, there were white slave masters, shippers, sellers and abolitionists, and these families, too, are all part of the horrible-yet-fascinating diaspora that is African-American history.

In no particular order, here are some intriguing resources that I think you'll find useful:

1867 Alabama Voter Registration database. This Reconstruction-era list of Alabama voters includes information on the race of registered voters. There are 70,000 African-American men listed here -- about half of all voters on the list. Along with name and county/precinct information, there is a section for "Native" country, though this seems to be rarely filled in.

Kansas Memory African-American Collection. There are several hundred items of interest here, including several county censuses from the late 1800's that include the race of respondents, a 1934 Colored Directory for Topeka, and a file on African-American Cowboys.

At the Minnesota State Archives, you can find the Duluth Lynchings Online Resource, with more than 2,000 pages of scanned documents from this 1920 tragedy. Their Visual Resources Database has about 1,000 African-American images.

From New York State, you can find the Harlem Hellfighters WWI Muster Rolls, the first African-American regiment to participate in World War I.

The West Virginia State Archives have diversified pages on African-Americans in the state. These include information on individuals, as well as broader contextual resources, like a timeline of significant events in WV black history.

Some of the primary documents and behind-the-scenes events in the history of the civil rights struggle can be found at the new Library of Congress exhibit, NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom.

Also from the LoC, the WPA Slave Narratives, over 2,000 first person accounts of slavery, along with about 500 photos, collected by the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930's.

The State Archives in New Jersey has several collections related to black family history:

U.S. Colored Troops Service Files (Civil War)
Hunterdon County Slave Manumissions -- 1788-1836
Hunterdon County Census of Children of Slaves - 1804-1835

There is also an in-depth history available online: Afro-Americans in New Jersey: a short history.

Also don't forget some of my earlier entries here at FGT:

African American Family History

Slaves and Slavery

Michelle Obama's Family Tree

African American Newspaper Archives

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.

State Archives

2010-01-29T12:24:00.003-05:00

With little fanfare, state governments have been digitizing their historical archives and putting mountains of new information online.

A new website called, logically enough, Digital State Archives, is beginning to sort through this newly-available content, and highlight the crème de la crème. Happily, a good deal of state archive materials are valuable resources for genealogists.

Here are just a few examples to whet your family-history appetites:

Alabama's Archives include online records of Civil War and World War I soldiers, as well as an 1867 Voter Registration database including thousands of newly-registered ex-slaves.
Alaska's archive collections include probate records, an index to pioneers, and a large collection of obituaries from historical newspapers and magazines.
Over at the Illinois Archives, you'll find cemetery internment records, online newspaper archives, and a scary clown!
The good folks at the Minnesota Archives, bless their archival hearts, have consolidated many of their historical name lookups into a single Minnesota People Find search page.
New York has a wonderful collection of the Harlem Hellfighters WWI Muster Rolls, and a huge Civil War database, while their archiving neighbors in Pennsylvania have their own collection of military records dating back to the Revolutionary War.

These links just skim the surface, of course. So much online material is available, and so much is continually being added, that state archives should be a regular internet stopping point for anyone serious about family history research.

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.

Some Good European Resources, With Soundex

2010-01-25T12:47:00.001-05:00

One branch of my family harks back to the Sarotchkin clan. Or maybe it was the Sarochkin's. Or Sorotchkin. Sarotzkin? Who knows?

Localized spelling of family names, non-Latin alphabets like Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic or Greek, and the whimsical nature of official papers like passenger manifests and immigration forms all contrive to make family history research even more complex than it otherwise is.

Which is why I'm writing today to suggest a visit to the slightly oddly-named Genealogy Indexer. This site (currently in beta) does two very interesting and very useful things.

One, it compiles some primary European resources that you don't see all the time, like historical directories, military records, and Yizkor books (memorials to the Jewish dead). The focus is primarily Eastern Europe, though there are resources here from France and the UK, among other countries.

Secondly, it incorporates three search functions:

exact search on a name or keyword (as spelled)
a Soundex search, which returns a wide variety of phonetic spelling variations
an OCR-adjusted search. This last also returns word variations, though I'm not very clear on what its underlying logic might be.

Try all three search types to compare results. And if the Soundex results are a bit overwhelming, you can use the Advanced Search features to narrow things down a bit.

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.

African American Newspaper Archives

2010-01-21T22:53:00.004-05:00

There are a few free newspaper archives available online that focus on the African American community, or on anti-slavery, or both. These are valuable resources for black history in general, and for black family history in particular. I hope to one day see more materials like this available online (Google News Archives, are you listening?).

But for now, the key materials are:

Freedom's Journal (1827-1829), a weekly publication from New York City, and widely regarded as the first major African-American newspaper in the country.

The Friend of Man (1836-1842), an anti-slavery publication from upstate New York.

The Colored American (1893-early 1900s), a Washington DC newspaper with a national focus, made available through the Library of Congress.

Muncie Times Newspaper (1991-current). A contemporary African American newspaper serving communities in Indiana, and one of the few I've found with an appreciable archive.

Google News Archives includes several black newspapers, including the Washington Afro-American, and similar publications from Baltimore and Richmond. To search include source:afro along with your search terms.

Two other archives of note are subscription services, but have rich collections just the same:

African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century collection, from Accessible Archives

NewspaperArchive.com, is the world's largest online newspaper archive. They haven't yet made clear which of their publications are African American, but with billions of articles to search, they are certainly worth a visit for any serious genealogy researcher.

And lest we forget, a few earlier posts on black family history resources: African American Genealogy, Michelle Obama's Family Tree, and Slaves and Slavery.

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, one of the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

FGT Challenge: Round I

2010-01-15T20:40:00.012-05:00

Whew! You folks don't fool around with your brick walls, do you.

Thanks to everyone who responded to the FGT Challenge of a few days ago. There are some terrific (frustrating, I know...but terrific just the same) family history roadblocks presented there. Feel free to continue adding comments there. I hope to be able to get to a few more of the challenges myself, but even if I don't, the commenters themselves have been offering some valuable insights and leads to help others out.

The proverbial brick wall!

One challenging situation provided in a comment from GenealSue Renzo was:

Joseph Henery Hyland was born in Nov 1863 somewhere in Ireland. According to the 1900 census he emigrated to Manhattan NY in 1885. Also according to this census he married Anna Keegan in 1892. He and Anna had four children, one daughter (my grandmother) and three sons. He appears again on the 1910 Manhattan census, but that's it. By 1920 his wife had re-married. I cannot locate bmd records,other family, immigration records or naturalization records.

Here's what I came up with from some of my favorite FGT resources:

CastleGarden.org shows a Joseph Hyland, age 21, arriving in NYC on December 16, 1885 on the ship, Lake Superior, from Liverpool. He is listed as a 'Laborer', but his nationality is not clearly stated.

Ancestry.com has a passenger list with a Hyland arriving in NY on May 16, 1885 from Queenstown, Ireland and Liverpool, England. First name is not totally clear, but seems to be an abbreviation: Jno, who is a 21 year old male from Ireland (ie, born 1863-64). He arrived on the ship, City of Richmond.

The NYC Death Index includes dozens of Joseph Hyland's. There doesn't seem to be quite the right combination of death year and age, except for one entry, where the date of death is February 19, 1919, and the age is unknown (actually, it's shown as 999 years!).

There are also NYC birth records online, with numerous Hyland births in the right date range. However, the online records provide the child's -- but not the parents' -- names, so it can't be pinned down with any certainty. Still...you might want to have a look:

FYI, you can request a search of NYC vital records (births, deaths, marriages) from the NYC Municipal Archives for a very reasonable fee:

That's it for now, but stay tuned for more FGT Challenge 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 NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com.
These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

The FGT Challenge

2010-01-11T09:23:00.004-05:00

Know why I call this blog Free Genealogy Tools? Go on...guess!

Today we're offering a free tool for you family history buffs that's a bit different from the usual name look-ups, databases, archives and such...the 2010 FGT Challenge:

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Post a personal genealogy challenge in the Comments here. I'll pick one for some in depth research, to see what FGT can find.

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So...tell us about your great grandfather, who seems to have disappeared without a trace, or your ancestors who immigrated to America, even though you can't find any record of their journey.

Who knows what mysteries will be revealed?

Don't be afraid to go way back, to your beknighted relatives in medieval England, perhaps.

Toss down the genealogical gauntlet...we'll see what we can find. So Comment away. Remember, though, this is a public webpage, so all material will be visible to my millions, er thousands umm scores of FGT readers.

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 NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com.
These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

A Never-Before Seen, Quite Fantastic Genealogy Collection

2010-01-07T21:40:00.006-05:00

I can say with considerable confidence that I've come across a sizable collection of online, free books on ancestry and genealogy that no one's ever seen before.

How can I possibly know this? 'Cause I created the collection myself. And I'm happy to now be able to share it with you.

World War I Honor Roll,

from the U Michigan Library via Hathi Trust

I posted a few weeks ago about the Hathi Trust digital books collection. This is a pretty new and quite substantial resource, comprised of millions of digitized books housed at university libraries and other distinguished collections.

A nice feature of Hathi is that they give users the opportunity to create their own collection-within-a-collection. Hathi users have created personal collections of books on topics as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Dime Novels, and Historic Bicycling.

There's even a collection on How to Be a Domestic Goddess (with 123 books, no less!).

And now, without further ado, I am proud to announce the world premier of the Free Genealogy Tools Ancestry and Genealogy Collection at Hathi Trust, henceforth known by its elegant acronym, FGT-AGC@HT.

There's well over 2,000 books in the collection. Many of them are family genealogies, with titles like:

An historical and genealogical account of Andrew Robeson, of Scotland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and of his descendants from 1653 to 1916
An account of Azariah Orton, of Farmington, Illinois, and his descendants (1900)
The Robinsons and their kin folk (1902)

There are some geographic titles:

1800 census of Kent County, Delaware
Parochial and family history of the parishes of Tintagel and Trevalga, in the country of Cornwall (1877)

some deep-sounding reference works:

Passenger lists of ships coming to North America, 1607-1825; a bibliography (1937)
The abridged compendium of American genealogy; first families of America; a genealogical encyclopedia of the United States (1925)

and a fair number of mystery items:

Danmark-Norges len og lensmaend 1596-1660 (1885)

By the way, creating smallish collections at Hathi Trust is easy, but a large collection like this one, with thousands of documents, took some behind the scenes assistance. My sincerest thanks to Jeremy and Chris for their fast and effective help.

FGT-AGC@HT is fully searchable and access is, of course, entirely free. I'd love to hear your Comments as to whether it's a useful collection, and how you used it for your family history research. Thanks.

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 NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com.
These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Ancestor School Days

2010-01-06T19:33:00.011-05:00

What, pray tell, were mom and dad or grandma and grandpa doing back in school?

Stuffing phonebooths (remember those)? Sitting on flagpoles? Demonstrating? Streaking?

Perhaps one of your ancestors was a student class president. Scored the winning touchdown in the championship football game. Member of the debate team. Voted most likely to succeed...or go to jail! Whatever academic superlatives and shennanigans lie in their past, there are some very useful tools for unearthing some of their high school, college and university history.

First and foremost, are scattered but often fairly deep collections of college newspapers. If you're lucky, and grandpa's alma mater has its newspaper archives online, then you've struck gold. Granddad may well have been written up in the student paper, but even if he wasn't, you can still come away with a good overview of what campus life was like back in the day.

Most college newspaper archives extend back at least to the early 20th century. The University of Richmond, in Virginia, has free online archives dating back to 1914, while Barnard College in New York City goes back to 1901. Not to be outdone, the Harvard Crimson dates all the way back to 1873, while its neighbor at U Mass only manages to date back to 1966.

Here's a good list of free college newspaper archives, so you can explore what's available.

There's a ton of archived high school and college yearbooks scattered about, like this 100-year collection of yearbooks from Penn State, or the Columbus, Indiana High School collection of yearbooks.

These can be a lot of fun to browse, but you need to do some scouting around to find them. A good trick is to search one of the commercial yearbooks sites like e-yearbook or even ebay to see what exists in digitized form. If you find one, then search the web more generally to see if it's posted for free. If it's not, then you can purchase the yearbooks from the sites where you found them, if you're so inclined.

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 NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com.
These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Family Trees, Family Tribes

2010-01-04T09:13:00.003-05:00

There are a number of make-your-own-family-tree sites floating around. I happen to like TribalPages myself.

First off, it's a large search site, with a database of either 50 million or 25 million names (the site gives different numbers on different pages). Whatever the right number, though, it's a biggie.

The Queen's family tree is a large one.

Find your tribe as well.

Be sure to use the TribalPages search tool and search on your family name, to see what turns up. With luck, you may not only uncover some family history, but you may unearth an old portrait or two out of the more than 1.5 million photos at the site.

There's more here than just name searching, including the opportunity to build your own family tree website, free of charge. These are nicely done, interactive pages. Their sample page on the British Royal Family Tree gives you a good idea of the features available.

This is a site worth exploring.

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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 NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com.
These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Bit by Bit: Slavery and Family History

2009-12-30T15:41:00.002-05:00

There are so few online resources available for African-American family history research, that even a fairly small-scale online lookup deserves attention.

Johnston County, home to Smithfield, North Carolina, has a very handsome and user-friendly collection of online archives.

The county has a rich agricultural history that was made possible, in large measure, by slave labor. Included in the online collection are two important resources for African-American genealogy.

Slave Name Index for Johnston County, NC. Aptly described as "one of the first of its kind", this name database compiles information from a few dozen primary sources -- deeds, wills, court records, tax rolls, and estate papers. The result is a lookup list of slave names.

Slavery being what it was, pinning down particular individuals and families is tricky going. Most slave records are first names only, and spelling is highly variable. Details on the slaves, and slave owners are provided, which can help facilitate research.

The Johnston County Heritage Center also offers to provide copies of original records, to those who request them.

Slave Marriage and Cohabitation Index. Emancipated slaves were offered the opportunity to officially record the fact of their marriage, and these records too, are available online. Full names are generally included, and you can search on either the first name or last name of the groom or the bride.

The Virginia Memory project has some similar slave and ex-slave records available online (click on African-American Resources to access them). The Register of Colored Persons Cohabiting Together as Man and Wife collection is not very extensive, but there is a great deal of information available for each of the families listed...full name for the husband and wife as well as former owners, age, birthplace, occupation, children's names and age, and more. This will be a goldmine for the fortunate researchers who find their families included here.

A few other African-American genealogy resources to note have been written up in earlier posts:

African American Family History

Slaves and Slavery

Filling in Michelle Obama's Family Tree

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 NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com.
These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Your Mom or Dad's (Grandma, Grandpa's) Social Security Application as a Family History Resource

2009-12-29T14:50:00.001-05:00

First, a confession. Today's post at FreeGenealogyTools is about a resource that isn't actually free. Mea culpa! But it doesn't cost much, and it's so @*$&#! useful, that it's worth knowing about and maybe even worth forking out some cash.

At one time or another, just about everyone living in the US -- and many who have passed on -- have filled out an application for a Social Security number.

Two generations ago, these were largely being filled out by adults. As the Social Security system matured, parents began filling them out for their children as well. But regardless, an application was filed for just about everyone.

These can be family history goldmines. Though the application has changed over the years, the earlier ones contained details such as:

Full name
Maiden name (where applicable, of course)
Complete address
Current employer
Date of employment
Date of birth
Place of birth
Father's full name
Mother's full name and maiden name
Race

The form required a signature, which is also part of the application record.

Like I said, a real genealogy goldmine.

You can get a copy of the original application form directly from Social Security. There is a modest fee, which varies depending on the nature of your request. A family member who is living will have to make the request themselves, but if they've passed on, then you can request a copy.

Worth the effort...worth the cost.

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.

Merry Xmas...I Found Santa's Grave

2009-12-23T21:32:00.001-05:00

Happy Holidays everyone, and please....forgive me...but I've located Santa's grave.

Actually, Ol' Saint Nick has a number of ancestral death records. Using the Best Genealogy Tools for 2010 that I highlighted a few days ago, here's what turns up with a search on the name, Santa Claus.

FamilySearch uncovers two records in the Social Security Death Index, complete with Santa's SSN:

Santa CLAUS

Birth Date: 10 Jun 1930

Death Date: 10 Sep 2008

Social Security Number: 428-48-5735

State or Territory Where Number Was Issued: Mississippi

Santa CLAUS

Birth Date: 15 Jan 1944

Death Date: 26 Aug 2003

Social Security Number: 326-34-2714

State or Territory Where Number Was Issued: Illinois

Stephen Morse's wonderful site uncovers an Italian immigrant to the US in the Castle Garden database, one Santo Clausi, who arrived in New York on October 1, 1902.

Morse also has a search interface to Ancestry.com, where we find 20 Santa's, including Santa M. Claus, Santa Elf Claus, and even Santa Hohoho Claus (with an odd attached note of Other Possible Names: Kris Hohoho Kringle).

And alas, at FindAGrave we have photographic proof of the final resting place of Santa "Nick" Claus.

Santa's demise notwithstanding, I suspect folks will have a very Merry Christmas and assorted other solstice-inspired celebrations this holiday season.

Here's hoping for a prosperous, peaceful new year for all.

David

Santa Claus, his wife Mabel, and the six kids, from the 1930 Census. No Rudolph, though!

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.

The Best Free Family History Lookups for 2010

2009-12-21T09:39:00.001-05:00

We've covered a lot of territory since the Free Genealogy Tools blog first started up. But what, you may ask, are the absolute best FGTs out there?

Here's my list of the Top Five Free Genealogy Tools for 2010.

Say Howdy Doody to the new year, folks.

FamilySearch. You just can't beat this one. It covers almost as much territory as the genealogy motherlode at Ancestry.com, but without the need for a subscription.
Stephen Morse. I love this guy, whoever he is. He created easy-access tools to search millions of records from Ellis Island, Castle Island, and other immigration points of entry to the US. One of the real online genealogical gems.
Social Security Death Index (SSDI). With more than 80 million records, this database covers almost all deaths in the US for the past 50 years or so...an essential tool for recent family history.
Google News Archives. Old newspapers are a favorite resource of mine, and these archives span the past 250 years. Also check out NewspaperArchive.com, a subscription service, but one of the best resources there is.
Find A Grave. Over 35 million records...need I say more?

Conspicuously absent from the above list are the millions of military records available in online lookups. Problem is, it's hard to choose the best from among some excellent resources, mostly from the US and UK. Have a look at the best military lookup sites I know of.

Is there a Top FGT that you think belongs on the list? Let me know in the Comments, and we'll take a look

And as we head into 2010, a happy, healthy, meaningful and peaceful new year to all.

David

People Who Need Pipl

2009-12-19T14:31:00.001-05:00

There are many, many, many tools on the internet that specialize in searching for people, both living and dead. I've covered some of the best people-search sites in an earlier post.

But a site called Pipl.com warrants a separate write-up. This is partly because of what it does for you now, but also, partly, for what it might do in the future. Sort of like Obama's Nobel Peace Prize!

Fanny Brice, an original People person

Pipl does a very nice job of searching on a name, and organizing the results...telephone book listings in one section, Facebook and other social networks in another, business results in yet another, and so on.

But Pipl also has some good access to the so-called invisible web...that vast, dark, mysterious repository of information that doesn't show up on ordinary searches. These are sources that require a subscription, disallow search engines, require dynamic lookups, or are otherwise out of view from the googlebots and search spiders that scour the internet for information.

And that's where Pipl's future potential lies. Right now, it's more a lookup for friends, acquaintances and family members of fairly recent vintage (and be sure to Pipl your own name as well...might as well see what shows up!).

But as Pipl search adds more and more deep content, it will grow in value as a genealogical tool as well, revealing ever-more information about your ancestors and your own family's history.

So take a look, and even if nothing of major import shows up for now, this is a site worth bookmarking, and coming back to from time to time.

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.

Using the Future to Find the Past

2009-12-14T17:50:00.005-05:00

Nothing like a mysteriously ambiguous blog title to capture some viewers, eh?

Actually, though, this really is about using future tools to peer back in time at your family history. You're probably already familiar with the venerable FamilySearch site -- one of the premier genealogy sites on the web.

But did you know FamilySearch also has a Labs page? This is where they post their up-and-coming tools that are in development, and are made available for a test run. That's right...you can be the first one on your block to try out the latest genealogical power tools.

Marie Curie in The Lab

The current listings at FamilySearch Labs include some intriguing possibilities for new ways to explore your family history:

FamilySearch Beta -- a major renovation to the familysearch.org web site
Record Search -- a quick and easy way to search millions of historical records for clues about your ancestors.
Research Wiki -- a community of research experts and interested genealogists that share up to date information on how to research sources for information about your ancestors.
Community Trees -- Ever wish you could reconstruct the families that lived in your ancestral village in the 1750s? Now you can.

I highlighted one of the Lab success stories -- the Pilot Search for Ancestors -- in an earlier post.

There's much more than this available, so be sure to check out the FamilySearch Labs page (and while you're there, check out their motto as well!).

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.

Family Trees in Wikipedia

2009-12-12T12:19:00.004-05:00

Today's entry is just a link, but it's a link worth knowing about.

Wikipedia's List of Family Trees is exactly what it says...a compilation of notable family trees, including nobility and royalty, rich and famous families, important religious and historical figures, and many more.

An Ahnentafel-style family tree from Wikimedia.

They even have family trees for fictional families. If you've ever wanted to map out the familial relations for Scrooge McDuck, Luke Skywalker or Marge Simpson (and who wouldn't?), then this is the place.

Among the more intriguing family names you'll find here are:

Lady Astor and her brood, along with the Roosevelt family, from the US.

Dynasties from Egypt, Persia, Japan, China, Korea, Mongolia and the Aztec Empire.

The Nehru and Gandhi families from India, and Bhutto from Pakistan.

Family trees from the Bible, Islam, Babylonia, and the Greek Gods (an essential item for you Percy Jackson fans).

And lest we forget, there's the wonderful, recent work done on Michelle Obabma's family tree.

There's nothing in this whole collection that ties these historical figures (real or imagined) in any way to my own family. I imagine that's true for most folks. Still, it's a wonderful and interesting overview of who's who, and of how family trees get put together. Wikipedia also has a general article on Family Trees that is worth a read.

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.

Googling Your Family History

2009-12-09T18:42:00.002-05:00

Let's face it. When it comes to search tools of both the plain and fancy variety, nobody even comes close to Google.

But a company that started life as the soul of simplicity -- a nearly blank page and an I'm feeling lucky option -- has grown to ginormous size, and taken on a fair bit of complexity in the process. That's not a bad thing, because some of their more obscure internet search tools can really lend a lot of depth and power to your family history research, starting with...

Thanks, Google

Plain Old Google, but use it wisely, as in this ...kaff...kaff... insightful article on how to power search your ancestors.

Google News Archives, a very rich newspaper resource that extends back hundreds of years (at least to the 1750's, maybe further), reaches around the world, and grows by leaps and bounds. Visit it often.

Google Books lets you search the text of millions of books in the space of a few heartbeats...it still amazes me that such searches are even possible. There's also Google Scholar, which searches through tons of legal court cases and university journals.

Google Patents makes it easy to search through a few centuries worth of patents, looking for the inventors in your family history.

Google is also getting more and more sophisticated at handling non-English languages. They offer several tools that can be incredibly useful in getting a handle on what an obscure foreign-language webpage or document is all about. Google Translate can handle (reasonably well, too) about 50 languages, everything from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Their transliteration and scripting tools make it easier (I didn't say easy) to work with foreign alphabets.

Lastly (for now) I'll mention Google Alerts, a very valuable tool for setting up automatic searches to look for new information on your family as it appears on the web.

Don't make the mistake of thinking your family never got written up in old newspapers, books, patents or other historical resources. They did! And it's up to you to find them. Google helps in that search, more than I would have thought possible just a few short years ago.

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.

Immigration Records From Harvard University

2009-11-30T10:10:00.002-05:00

Harvard University has made available a digital collection, Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930.

There's a lot here. As the collection notes say, they have about "...1,800 books and pamphlets as well as 9,000 photographs, 200 maps, and 13,000 pages from manuscript and archival collections." There's a strong Massachusetts focus, not surprisingly, but a good deal of other materials as well.

Off on the left-hand side of their page, you'll find several search options: a Keyword search box, along with links to Search the Collection and Browse the Collection. I'd suggest giving them all a try, as they access the records in different ways, and turn up different results, even for the same search.

Italian immigrants at work in New York City, ca 1909

The Immigration collection is part of Harvard's larger Open Collections Program. It's worth a look around here at some of their other materials, which include materials of both general interest, as well documents of value to family history researchers. Their Women Working collection is of particular note.

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.

Advertising as a Family History Resource

2009-11-27T22:39:00.001-05:00

Finding your ancestors is one thing. Finding out how they lived their day to day lives is another thing entirely.

Some interesting and often overlooked resources for getting a sense of everyday life are the advertisements of a given time and place. What did your great grandparents see when they opened a local newspaper or magazine, or rode a horse and buggy past an early billboard or an ad-painted barn?

Mmmm. Ox-tail soup! Everyone's favorite.

Turns out, Duke University has a deep collection of early advertisements. Several collections, actually:

AdAccess includes images of over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.
AdViews contains thousands of early television commercials from the 1950's through the 1980's.
Emergence of Advertising in America contains images of 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920.

Protestant Images. An odd collection of articles and advertising images of Protestant children and families in the U.S. from Protestant-supported or targeted magazines.
Medicine and Madison Avenue. Images of over 600 health-realted advertisements and historical documents dated between 1911 and 1958.

Some historical advertising sources worth exploring outside the Duke collection:

Adflip bills itself as the world's largest searchable database of classic print ads from 1940-2001. It's a subscription site, but many of the ads can be viewed for free at medium resolution.

Ivory Project. From the Smithsonian, 1,600 advertisements about soap, mostly Ivory Soap...1838-1998. Imagaine that!

HardToFindAds. A motley assortment of print ads covering most of the 20th century. Some good stuff, here, but I wish the ads all had dates and sources!

FullTable is one of the, ahem, more unusual sites you're likely to come across, but it has an intriguing collection of historical images, ads and otherwise. Not really a site for research, this is more a place for some fascinating browsing. It's worth a look!

Magazine-Ads. 1410 new and old ads in 108 catagories Ads are for sale, but can be previewed online.

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

And you can't beat old newspapers for old ads, so 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.

What's In A (Place) Name?

2009-11-26T22:01:00.002-05:00

So, you've finally filled in the blanks of your family's history, and tracked your ancestors in Pie Town, New Mexico; Spuyten Duyvil, NY; or Trinchinopoly in India. Where do those names come from?

What's the connection between Kentucky in the US, and Quinté in Canada? Is Palermo, in Italy, really derived from Greek?

Questions like these can be explored -- and quite possibly answered -- with dozens of online place name dictionaries. Here are some of the best that you should know about.

School kids (some shoeless) in Pie Town,
but how did it get that name, exactly?

US:
The origin of certain place names in the United States

The book of place-names (US focus, but with lots of international information)

Scotland:
Place-names of Scotland

Scottish land-names: their origin and meaning

Ireland:
The origin and history of Irish names of places

UK:
Geographical etymology: a dictionary of place-names giving their derivations

The place-names of England and Wales

South America:
Aztec place-names: their meaning and mode of composition

Canada:
Place-names of Canada

Worldwide:
Names and their histories: a handbook of historical geography and topographical nomenclature

Bibliotheca classica: or, A dictionary of all the principal names and terms relating to the geography, topography, history, literature, and mythology of antiquity and of the ancients

Glossary of geographical and topographical terms and of words of frequent occurrences in the composition of such terms and of place-names

There are hundreds of place names dictionaries and gazetteers for more local areas, like a particular state, county or city. To find them, try searching at Google Books and HathiTrust.

And Pie Town? Sure enough, guy opens a shop at some crossroads, sells homemade pies that everyone likes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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.

Translating Family Papers and Records

2009-11-25T10:01:00.003-05:00

The story is told of one of the early machine translation systems that was asked to translate the phrase The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak from English, into Russian, and then back into English again. When the final results appeared, the computer came up with The wine is good, but the meat is rotten.

Online computer translations have gotten better since then, and can generally handle The spirit is willing test. I often use Google Translate to help out with foreign language websites, as I did with my French Revolution post. Still, machine translation will only get you so far. My post on Arab genealogy, where I Google-translated some book titles, led to some pretty strange results.

The Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition of 1900

Sometimes, you just need a human translator to help you work through grandpa's birth records from the old country, or a letter in your family files in Hebrew, or Estonian, or wherever it is your family's roots have led.

A full-fledged translation service can be a big expense, but happily, there are some kind folks out there who will translate reasonable-sized passages (usually no more than a few paragraphs) at no charge. Here are a few good ones.

Freelang. Email a translator directly, with a polite request for some help, and they will usually oblige.
Cucumis. A free human translation system based on points. You can earn points if you translate something for someone else. But even if you're a one-language moron (like me), you still get points to use just for signing up.
Linguanaut. Click on Free Translation to get started, and they'll put you in touch with a translator.
WikiTranslation. Simply enter the text to have translated, the from and to languages, and hopefully, a kind and resourceful human being will soon do your bidding (thanks to commenter Bob for pointing this one out).

Isn't the internet grand?

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.

Vive La Revolution! Vive La France!

2009-11-23T08:39:00.003-05:00

Here's a...ahem....head's up on an unusual site.

If you had an ancestor who lost his or her head during the French Revolution, now you can find them. A site named Les Guillotinés de la Révolution Française asks the crucial question:

Avez-vous eu un ancêtre

DECAPITE

Pendant la Révolution ?

and answers it with a large list of many of the tens of thousands of people who were executed during The Reign of Terror.

The last moments of Marie 'Let Them Eat Cake' Antoinette.

Here is the English version of Les Guillotines homepage, courtesy of Google Translate.

This is a quick and easy lookup, handled by clicking on a letter of the alphabet.

A small number of the resulting names are hyperlinked, leading to additional information about the person beheaded, generally including their age, the charges brought against them, and the date and site of their execution.

The story of the French Revolution isn't pretty, but then again, family history often isn't, ne c'est pas?

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.

The 1911 Census of Ireland

2009-11-19T19:55:00.001-05:00

For some reason, it's taken me a while to get around to writing up one of the jewels of online family history research.

The 1911 Irish Census is online, absolutely free, and fully searchable for all 4.4 million Irish men, women and children of the time.

You can search by first or last name, of course. You can also focus searches on a given county, address or DED (election district). You can also specify gender and approximate age to help narrow down results...especially useful when searching on a name like, Oh, say....Fitzpatrick!

Saints be praised, it's Michael Fitzpatrick and family.

The search results make it very easy to quickly scan all members of a household, and even pull up an image of the original census forms. And let me emphasize forms...there are a number of different forms use to record details not only of people, but of structures and neighborhoods. Make sure to give them all a good looking-over.

There is also a very lovely section titled What was Ireland like in 1911? It's very much worth spending some time here (even if you don't have a single drop of Irish blood in your family line).

And whatever you do, don't overlook the fantastic picture of The Titanic under construction in Belfast.

See an earlier post for more UK Census and vital records.

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.

Going To The Country

2009-11-17T20:28:00.000-05:00

Here are a few odds and ends name lookups from a number of countries you don't often hear from in family history circles. Enjoy!

INDIA

Search through more than 600,000 records in FIBIS, the Families in British India database.

HOLLAND/NETHERLANDS

Genlias, the Dutch Civil Register, lists more than 12 million vital records (birth, death, marriage) back to 1811.

Tresoar (Dutch for 'treasure'...I Google-translated it) allows extensive searching of family history and vital records in Friesland, courtesy of the Frisian Historical and Literary Centre. Click on the UK flag for the English version of the site, and then click on Genealogy for links to family history searches both before and after the 1811 creation of a Civil Register.

POLAND

The Polish Order of the Virtuti Militari and its Cavaliers 1792-1992. This military award, Poland's equivalent of the Medal of Honor, includes 26,500 records. The site is free, but registration is required.

SOUTH AFRICA

Ancestry24 in South Africa is the equivalent of Ancestry.com. This is a fee-based service, but much of the preliminary information on name search results can be viewed for free.

GUAM

That's right...how often to you get to search through vital records from Guam. Here you'll find thousands of records published in local newspapers, the Guam Newsletter and the Guam Recorder.

LATVIA

Vital records from Latvia from the 1800's.

MIDDLE EAST

Not quite name lookups, but some interesting materials on Arab family history in the Middle East.

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.

More Military Record Lookups

2009-11-16T11:52:00.010-05:00

The history of bureaucracy (now there's a fascinating topic for you) can probably best be traced by studying war. Military operations are huge undertakings, and have been for millennia. Armies need to keep records for logistics management, operational planning, awarding honors, and most importantly -- for the soldiers! -- to distribute pay.

Happily, for family researchers, many records from these military bureaucracies are finding their way online. We've covered many free Military Lookups here at Free Genealogy Tools, but there are always more coming to our attention.

ANZACS with pipes, during the Great War

Here are some of the latest that, due to their size or sheer interestingness, are well worth a look.

Australian ANZACS in the Great War, 1914-1918. These cover the Australian half of the WWI records of the Australian-New Zealand Army Corps Service (ANZACS), and include about 330,000 service records from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).

Moving ahead a generation, Australia's Nominal Roll for WWII includes over a million service records.

Bet you never thought you'd find military records from Cuba online, but here they are! The Cuba Database of Officers of the Ten Years War 1868-1878 (several thousand records), and almost 70,000 records of the Cuban Liberation Army ('Mambi' Army) 1895-1898.

There are, sadly, millions of records in the German War Graves lookups. (Grabernachweis des Volksbundes). You can view the site more or less in English thanks to Google Translate.

Lastly, two pretty unusual finds for military medals and honors.

The Medals of Saint Helena (Les medailles de Sainte-Helene) include about 200,000 records awarded in 1857 by Napoleon III, to soldiers who served under Napoleon I, 1792-1815. Mostly French, but there are records from all over Europe as well.

The Polish Order of the Virtuti Militari and its Cavaliers 1792-1992, Poland's version of the Medal of Honor, includes 26,500 records. The site is free to search, but registration is required.

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.

African American Family History

2009-11-11T13:20:00.004-05:00

Little by little...ever so slowly, it seems...resources for researching African American genealogy are making their way to the internet.

Here are the best free tools that I know of for exploring black family history.

The National Archives African-American Research page is important to note, even though very few of their records are actually online (come on, NARA...what's taking so long?). Still, their holdings from the Freedmen's Bureau, military records, and slave trade files are essential records for African-American history and family research.

George Washington Williams, author, legislator, jurist

A list of large slaveholders in the South, and African American surnames has been compiled for the period 1860-1870. It's a bit cumbersome to use, but a good resource just the same.

A small but notable list: 1790 Census: Slave Holders, Other Free Persons and Slaves - Cheshire County - New Hampshire

Afrigeneas is probably the best source of overall information on African American genealogy. There are several good name lookup indexes at the site under the Records heading, including Census, Deaths, Slaves, and a growing Surnames database.

The Harlem Hellfighters were the first black regiment to fight in World War I, and their muster records are online. You can read more about the collection.

Alabama State Archives also has military records online in their WWI Gold Star database...enter African in the Race field to pull up African American records. These are occasionally amazing file, with photos, full biographies, family history, and more.

There is also the Alabama Archives database of 1867 Voter Registrations, which also includes race information. This is a pretty sizable collection, and well worth a visit.

A very nice blog of one black family's history.

An online ebook, History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880 Vol 1. Written in 1885 by George Washington Williams, "first colored member of the Ohio legislature..." Vol II is online as well.

North American Slave Narratives. Several hundred written records from the Digital Library of Georgia.

The Digital Library on American Slavery at UNC is a pretty new, hopefully growing resource that looks to have some excellent materials online, chiefly from petitions to state legislatures and county courts regarding slaves. These records are fully searchable.

There are a number of historical black newspapers that can be searched online, and at no cost.

I covered some additional resources on African American family history in two earlier posts on Slave Records, and on Michelle Obama's Family Tree, so be sure to visit them as well.

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

And don't forget to also check for African-American 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.

Arab Genealogy

2009-11-10T14:23:00.005-05:00

I usually highlight family history resources that are especially useful.

Today, I have to highlight a resource with a twist, and ask: Is this useful?

I can't tell!

The resource is the Digital Assets Repository at the New Library of Alexandria in Egypt (Bibliotheca Alexandrina ).

An Arabian family tree, perhaps?

Under their Categories listing, if you click on the Geography and History category, you'll get these intriguing results:

Genealogy, names insignia (307)
Biography, genealogy, insignia (882)

In other words, there are at least several hundred books here...possibly close to a thousand...that touch on genealogy and family history. In perusing the book lists, it's clear that the focus of these works is on family history in Arabia, and often on the particular family history of descendants from Mohammed.

Unfortunately, my exploration of the site pretty much had to end there. All the resources appear to be in Arabic, which effectively closes the door to my English-only brain.

In addition, the site...and I hate to say this...is only minimally functional in terms of actually letting users sort through and pull up available materials. Nothing is working quite right yet, though they hopefully will fix this down the road (it is a beta site, after all).

Using Google Translate, I can see that some of the resources have very useful-sounding names like:

Tombstones Muslim cemetery Sa'ada, Yemen
Dictionary of Arab Tribes of Old and Modern

Other translations are suggestive, but not terribly revealing, like:

Exciting existence, the descent, we find kings

while others are simply ???????

Sentences from the book flowed supervision

Anyway, if anyone can shed some light on this collection, and its value (or lack thereof) to those exploring Arabic family history, please post your remarks in the Comments.

Much appreciated.

David

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.

The Meaning and Origin of Family Names

2009-11-09T12:35:00.000-05:00

An earlier post described how to get free access to a wonderful look-up resource, the Dictionary of American Family Names.

There are plenty of other first name and surname dictionaries that offer free lookup of the meaning and origins of names. Most of them are not quite as US-centric as the well-known DAFN.

Woodhouse, a surname meaning the wild man of the woods

Have a look at:

An etymological dictionary of family and Christian names. With an essay on their derivation and import

Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom

Personal and family names

Family names and their story

The Teutonic name-system applied to the family names of France, England and Germany

British family names: their origin and meaning, with lists of Scandinavian, Frisian, Anglo-Saxon and Norman names

A dictionary of English and Welsh surnames: with special American instances

English surnames: An essay on family nomenclature, historical, etymological, and humorous; with several illustrative appendices

Each book is can be searched online for names of interest, or you can download the entire book to your own PC or e-book reader.

There are some good tidbits in these sources:

Peabody means Mountain Man, and is connected to a story about one Queen Boadicea.
Hanks is cryptically described as a 'nurse name'.
Clinton means the town on the hill.
Percy, derived from a story of a king who was killed with a lance through the eye, evermore to be known as Pierce-eye, which, "by the omission of several useless vowels" eventually becomes Percy.

And Rebecca's the world over will be pleased, I'm certain, to learn that their name means fat and full.

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.

The Stars and Stripes, World War I

2009-11-07T18:07:00.000-05:00

We usually go for the big databases here at Free Genealogy Tools. Today's entry is a small one, but it represents a big event. Even if your ancestors aren't specifically mentioned herein (and chances are, they won't be), this is still something that touched their lives.

During World War I, the Stars and Stripes newspaper (1918-1919) was printed for a total run of 71 weeks...71 issues aimed at the doughboys of what was officially called the American Expeditionary Forces, or simply the AEF.

The entire set of newspaper archives is available online at the Library of Congress. It's worth a look. Issues can be fully searched, or you can simply browse by date. In typical LOC fashion, accessing the newspapers is a bit on the clumsy side, but if you just pull up the pdf of the page (or the full newspaper) of interest, you can easily peruse the whole thing.

There's also a nicely-done Closer Look at the Stars and Stripes, which tells some of the back story of the newspaper itself.

If you're fortunate, you might find mention of one of your ancestors who was sent to fight the huns in WWI. But even if you don't, you'll get an exquisitely detailed rendering of the language and tenor of the times, right down to the inaguaral issue message from General Pershing, declaring that the soldiers were the lucky Americans, given the honor to serve their country in a way that few will ever experience.

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.

Get Paid for Genealogy Writing

2009-11-06T08:37:00.000-05:00

Usually here at Free Genealogy Tools, we're doing exactly what the blog-title says: offering up useful family history tools that you can use absolutely free.

Today, we're doing free one better, and showing you how you can get paid for your genealogy work.

There's a revolution taking place here on the internet, right under our noses. All manner of sites are making money (in some cases, lots of it) by attracting internet traffic...visitors like you and me. In order to be successful, though, the sites need good quality, compelling content on just about any topic imaginable.

Could be me, one day!

And that's where you, and your knowledge of genealogy, comes in. If you can write about your experience in family history research, you can earn some money with the content you've created. In fact, it doesn't even have to be writing. You can post photos, images of old records, podcasts of interviews, or a video of a local graveyard. All manner of content is welcome.

One of my favorite sites for posting is at eHow, where brief how-to articles can, with a bit of luck, earn a surprising income. One article of mine (took me about an hour to write) has earned $2,000 so far, and it's still going strong, bringing in new income every month.

That's the exception to the rule, but even my mainstream genealogy articles which pay far less are still doing very well, thank you:

You get the idea.

But if how-to's aren't your cup of tea, there are plenty of other sites where you can contribute more free-form content, such as Xomba, Examiner, and Google Knol.

Or of course, you can just build your own website, like my newspaper archives site, or even your own blog, like the one you're reading right now. These sites won't make me rich, necessarily, but they do bring in a steady (and steadily growing) income while I'm doing some family history writing that I love to do, anyway.

It's not a bad set-up. You can do it too.

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.

Genealogy Power Search

2009-11-05T20:41:00.002-05:00

Cyndi Howell, she of Cyndi's List fame, is fond of saying -- heck, is insistent on saying -- that there's no such thing as Internet Genealogy.

She's right, of course. The resources on the internet (including the wonderful Cyndi's List itself) are simply tools for getting genealogy done. Just as there's no such thing as Screwdriver Carpentry, there's no real discipline called Internet Genealogy. There are just tools that can make the job easier.

The right tools (used the right way) for the right job.

But what tools they are! Sites like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch are the power tools of family history research. But like any power tool, you have to be careful how you use them, or they'll whirr out of control, wreck your whole project, and possibly slice your nose off in the process.

Yep. Genealogy can be that perilous!

So, I just want to talk a bit today about some do's and dont's and tricks of the trade for searching, starting with searching for a person's name.

In Google-based tools, there are several different ways to search on an individual's name. Let's take my name, David Sarokin, as an example:

Free Form Search: David Sarokin Google comes up with 200,000 results (am I popular, or what?)
Exact Phrase (in quotes): "David Sarokin" 18,000 results (er, not so popular after all).
Exact Phrase with asterisk wildcard: "David * Sarokin" 50 results, including the odd times when I've used my middle name or initial.
Reverse Exact Search: "Sarokin David" 2,600 results, especially good for bibliographic references where my last name is listed first.
'OR' Searching: "David OR Dave OR Davey Sarokin" 5,000 results (no one calls me Davey, though).

You can see there are wildly different numbers of results for each search (though don't put too much stock in Google's search result numbers...they don't make a heck of a lot of sense). The important thing about the searches is that each variation picks up different results that are either missed completely by other searches, or buried too far down to be readily findable.

So whether you're searching plain old Google, or the amazing family history resource, Google News Archives, try varying your searches to see what nuggets turn up.

And be careful not to slice off your nose!

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.

Group Genealogy

2009-11-03T20:18:00.000-05:00

If you recognize the name Usenet, you've probably been on the internet for a l-o-o-o-o-n-g time. Usenet has been around since 1979, tying people together in little (or not so little) electronic clubhouses.

But even if the name doesn't ring a bell, Usenet gave rise to what are now known more generally as Groups. Groups are sort of like forums (which you're probably familiar with) and sort of different. A key thing about Groups, though, is that they're in a separate corner of the internet, and they don't show up in ordinary searches, unless you specifically look for them.

Blue circle for the topic of the Group, red circle for a full text search.

There are groups for just about every topic imaginable (and quite a few that are unimaginable, but we won't go there...). Of course, there are groups for genealogy and family history. Tons of them. Groups in the US, and Groups in the UK. Groups in English, and Groups in Slovak. Groups for medieval genealogy, genealogy in the Azores, and family histories of individual surnames or geographical areas.

But if you want to see what these Groups have to offer, you have to make it a point to go visit them.

So go ahead an explore. Try Google Groups for starters (which includes the Usenet archives way back to the 1980's!). Note that there are two types of searches here -- one on the main topic of the group (the blue circle in the picture to the right) and one that searches the actual content of the posts (red circle). Try them both.

Then take a look at Yahoo Groups, which also has some surprisingly rich content in the family history arena.

By the way, with a quick registration at either Google or Yahoo, you can easily start your own genealogy clubhouse, er, Group on the internet.

Enjoy your exploring.

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.

Finding the Artists in Your Family Tree

2009-11-02T08:00:00.002-05:00

Given the importance that cultures throughout history have placed on art, artists and the process of artistic creation, you'd think there would be some giant database somewhere that lists a few bazilion artists. You know...the type of lookup where you could poke around and search for any family members from generations past (or present) with an artistic streak of their own.

Well, think again. I can find you datasets with millions of soldiers...or inventors...or immigrants...or gravesites. But artists only seem to trickle out a few thousand at a time. I'm not sure why this is, but don't despair. There are still some good artists-as-family-history look-ups out there, starting with:

Drop what you're doing, go to Sienna, and see
this Simone Martini fresco...it's glorious.

ULAN...the Union List of Artist Names. This is the motherlode, with more than 375,000 names listed covering much of history, and much of the world, though there's certainly a preponderance of Western artists. As a nice touch, you can narrow your search by nationality. ULAN is part of the Getty Thesaurus collection (yes...that Getty!). There's a lot of cool stuff at the Getty site, so you may want to have a look around.

Artprice is probably the web's largest source of art auction-house information. It actually lists more artists than ULAN, but searching isn't as sophisticated and results (without subscribing to the site) are a bit limited. Still, a terrific free resource, overall, for searching for painters, sculptors, photographers and other artists in your family history. Another auction site, Find Art Info has another nice, big database to search on.

Two other sites have smaller listings, but might be worth a try: Artnet and, believe it or not, All Posters.

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.

Halloween Alert: Mad Scientist on the Loose!

2009-10-31T09:25:00.002-04:00

On this All Hallows Eve, it seems fair to ask: Is there a mad scientist in your family tree? Or perhaps even a very sane scientist or inventor, making the world a better place one discovery at a time.

There are two wonderful databases that cover hundreds of years of patents from around the world. Search them to see if one of your ancestors is included.

Google Patents covers seven million US patents (and a million more patent applications) that go back to 1790. Even if there are no relatives of yours listed here, this a fun and amazing resource to poke around in.

A not-so-mad scientist, perhaps.

The European Patent Office boasts one of the largest online databases in existence. They cover patents from all over Europe, of course, but they also have a global reach, with millions of patents from Albania to Zimbabwe, and scores of countries in between. Patent giants like China, Japan, Israel, Germany and Great Britain are here, along with patents from Kenya, El Salvador, and Viet Nam, just to name a few. Here, too, records go back several centuries. You may find an unheralded Edison or Einstein in your ancestry, with a bit of looking.

While you're at it, also pay a visit to WorldCat. If your creative ancestors ever wrote a science book (or any other sort of book, for that matter) they're likely to be listed here, in this massive online catalog of holdings from libraries around the world.

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.

Genealogical Acts of Kindness

2009-10-28T16:30:00.001-04:00

Let's say you've been a good little genealogist. You've interviewed your living family members, been to the library poring through old records and microfilm, and been all over the internet accessing all the cool data sources featured here at the Free Genealogy Tools blog.

And now you want to know more. You want a photo of great-grandma's gravesite in Indiana. A copy of a birth certificate from a small town in Arizona. A baptismal record from back in the old country.

You can plan one heck of a road trip to begin gathering up these old records (which is pretty much what Alex Haley did in writing Roots!).

Let a volunteer help you track down your family's roots

Or...you can ask for help. A site called Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness is built around a lovely concept: volunteer family historians agree to devote one day a month as volunteers, and offer free assistance to anyone in need in acquiring local records.

There are thousands of RAOGK volunteers all over the US and in many places around the world. Ask, and ye may well receive. Volunteers have been known to comb through courthouse records, visit graveyards and photograph the headstones, unearth local library records, and so on.

There is no fee for this wonderful service. However, protocol requires that volunteers are reimbursed for any out of pocket expenses, like copying fees, postage, and so on. Also, keep your request short and sweet... one person, one record.

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.

European Jews and the Holocaust

2009-10-27T16:55:00.000-04:00

It's hard to write about this latest family history database, as it's such a grim and awful reminder of humanity at its worst. Still, the Shoah Victims' Names Database at Yad Vashem is an incredible source of information on the millions of people who died at the hands of the Nazis during the holocaust.

The database contains about 3 million names, and hopes to one day have a fuller accounting of all the victims of Hitler's attempted genocide. The database is almost exclusively focused on Jewish names from all over Europe, though I understand there are records of non-Jews included as well.

Read the story of how Rozel and Kayla were identified from their photo.

The search interface looks to be very well designed, and will pull up records of closely related spellings and pronounciations for the name you search on. The information in the records varies, but the designers have bent over backwards to include as much information as they possibly can, including parents, siblings, relatives, and information on where and how people lived.

There is a substantial and poignant photo archive at the site.

You can also search the Related Lists Database. This resource is not searchable by individual names, but can be browsed by place name, group identity, or general keyword search. There are probably hundreds of thousands of individuals named on these lists that haven't yet been entered into the master Shoah Victims' Names Database.

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.

On the Qui Vive for Family History

2009-10-26T10:24:00.004-04:00

I'm surprised at how many people still don't know how easy it is to set up internet alerts.

An alert scans through new content on the web, looking for keywords that you specify. For instance, if you set an alert for the name of your great-grandfather, Shmoyim Strudlepfieffer, then any time Shmoyim's name is added to new content on the internet, you'll get an email alerting you to the link. An alert can be designed to search web pages, news stories, blog content, forums, or all of the above.

One of them might be great-granddaddy Strudlepfieffer

If your family name is an unusual one (like, for instance, Strudlepfieffer), then an alert simply on your family name might be enough to provide valuable genelogical information.

On the other hand, if grandpappy's name is John Smith, then your email inbox will wind up swamped with alerts about the thousands of people with that name that show up every day in new web postings. If that's the case, then include some keywords in your alert to help narrow things down -- an unusual middle name, perhaps, or the name of the small town that John Smith called home.

I like using Google Alerts myself. They are easy to set up and easy to modify if you end up with too many or too few results.

So keep on the alert, or on the qui vive, as they say, for any new family history information.

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.

Coats of Arms

2009-10-23T10:20:00.001-04:00

In 1905, a fellow by the name of Arthur Charles Fox-Davies published an encyclopedic tome called Armorial Families: a directory of gentlemen of coat-armour.

In its more than 1,500 pages, it covers a very large number of heraldy coats of arms in Britain, with illustrations and brief descriptions of the family histories and heads of family for each crest.

There's even a section devoted to the particular gentlemen's club to which the family head belonged.

As you may have surmised by now, the book is fully available online (for free, of course). It is a massive download, at more than 200 MB, so unless you're really keen on having this as your own file, you may want to use the Read Online ebook viewer offered at the Internet Archive. The Table of Contents can be found on page n31, while page n33 starts a list of the many splendid colored plates in the book.

Tally ho!

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.

Federal Land Records

2009-10-22T20:23:00.001-04:00

The US government has given away a lot, a lot, a lot of land in its day. Uncle Sam is just generous that way.

Much of the land has gone to homesteaders settling the West, of course. But a lot of other land grants (land patents, as they're often called) have happened as well...to veterans as a reward for military service; to Indian tribes as territory for reservations; to local jurisdictions as parks, townships, mineral rights transfers, just to name a few.

All told, there are millions of land records available online through the Bureau of Land Management. Most of these are actual images of land patents, though there's also a lot of index information, along with maps, and even an occasional census or two of the inhabitants of a jurisdiction being transferred.

David Crockett's land grant. Is that you, Davy?

You can search federal land patents at BLM. Use the Standard tab to search all states at once (the all states option is at the bottom of the pull-down list).

You can also search BLM records for land survey plats. There's more information here than you might suspect. Survey maps, of course, but also voluminous reports about the area under survey, including, sometimes, the inhabitants. Search and retrieval is awkward, but there's a lot here that might make it worthwhile.

Land Status Records are available for several Western states -- Colorado, Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas. These are official recordings of who has what rights when federal and local jurisdictions overlap. Of limited genealogy value, but there is some interesting history here, for those with family in the areas covered by the records.

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.

Search Multiple Censuses...About 30,000 of Them

2009-10-21T19:08:00.000-04:00

When someone mentions The Census to you, it probably brings to mind the national census in the US (if that's where you happen to live) or in whatever other country you call home. There is pretty familiar online access to old national census records in the US, Britain, and Canada, to name a few.

But there are literally thousands of historical censuses that occurred at a less-than-national level. These should not be overlooked in your search for family history, even if you've already found good information in national census records.

Brooklyn Birdseye tea, anyone?

State and local census records may well identify people who were not included in national headcounts, or can provide additional details about family members, including some deep dark secrets. Local censuses may also identify short-lived individuals who weren't alive for the last federal census, and didn't survive long enough for the next.

At a wonderful site called CensusFinder you can access thousands upon thousands of censuses with millions upon millions of records. Most of what you'll find here is from the big three in online census records -- the US, Canada and the UK -- though there are also links to records in Norway and Sweden. There's also a specialty section devoted to Native American census records.

The many different censuses are organized geographically, usually down to the state and county level (or the equivalent, such as province and shire). Some of these are pretty intriguing, like these from my hometown of Brooklyn (Kings County) NY:

1796 Directory of Brooklyn
1865 State Census of United States Naval Hospital at Brooklyn
1875 State Census of Brooklyn Industrial School
1875 State Census of Graham Home for Old Ladies
1880 Census of Howard Colored Home for Boys
1905 State Census of the Salvation Army Rescue Mission

As you can see, there are records here that you're not likely to find elsewhere.

The records themselves are quite a mixed bag. Some are simple text transcripts of historical records, while others provide actual page images of the original census. They come with varying degrees of explanation and context, as well. Most of the links appear to be free, though a few lead to sites where a fee is charged for full access.

Definitely worth some exploration time.

Also explore 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.

Free Online Courses in Family History

2009-10-18T20:02:00.000-04:00

Everyone who's doing anything in genealogy and family history research really owes it to themselves to get to know the Mormons a bit better. The resources that they have available at FamilySearch, Ancestor Search, and at their academic arm, Brigham Young University, are a genealogist's best friend.

Of particular note are the online free genealogy courses at BYU.

Their free Family History course offerings include:

Finding Your Ancestors
Introduction to Family History Research
Vital Records
Military Records
France: Vital Records (ditto for several other countries)
Germany: Immigrant Origins (again, a ditto for elsewhere)
Scandinavia: Jurisdictions, Gazetteers, and Maps

You get the idea. There's a lot here, both for general interest, as well as for specialty areas that might just help you burst through the brick wall on your own family's history.

A few courses are immediately accessible online, while others require a simple registration, which basically involves providing an email address.

These are wonderful offerings, and are absolutely free. Take advantage of them.

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.

Free Genealogy Resources in the UK and Europe

2009-10-17T18:39:00.000-04:00

Hope you don't mind a quick recap of some geography-based family history resources from Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the whole friggin' Empire thing they had going on), along with those from the rest of Europe:

Europe

A Peek Through European History The European Library is an instant connection to dozens of wonderful library collections throughout Europe.

Are You Royalty? Is there a Duke, Earl or Princess in your family tree. This is the place to check

Family and Cultural Heritage in Europe Europeana is another wonderful source of information on personal and cultural heritage and history,

Immigrants from Europe Search millions of immigration records, with particular emphasis on Russian, German, Irish and Italian immigrants to the US

Latvia Vital Records of the Late 19th, Early 20th Centuries Actual images of birth, marriage and death records from Latvia towns and churches.

Forces Reunited: Searching UK Military Records More than a million military records from England, etc.

Medieval Soldier Military Records (That's right...Knights!) How often do you get to search records from the 14th century?

World War I and World War II British Commonwealth Deaths Over a million records from the Great Wars of the 20th century, and from the entire British Empire.

Bring Out Your Dead With apologies to Monty Python, English and Irish death records.

Five Centuries of British Family History Records FreeUKGen hooks you up to millions of vital records spanning hundreds of years.

More English, Irish, Scottish, UK-ish Family History A hodge-podge of some pretty interesting and valuable research tools.

Proceedings of the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London This one is great...hundreds of years of trial transcripts from London's central courthouse.

One-Name Studies And this one's what you call off-beat, but well-worth a visit just the same.

Searching Free Online Historical Directories Before there were phone books, there were town and county directories, including many from the UK.

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.

Public Records

2009-10-15T20:43:00.002-04:00

Looking for ancestors and family means looking through public records. Sure, they may be public records from 300 years ago, but they also may be public records from last month.

A lot of sites compile links to different sources of public records that can be searched online. One of the best of these that I know of is the Public Records and Public Information page at Virtual Chase.

Though the site is geared to legal researchers, there's no reason we family history researchers can't make use of it as well. There is some interesting materials to be found here, like:

I hope there are no family members listed here.

Canadian bankruptcy (insolvency) filings back to 1978
INTERPOL wanted ciminals
Car Crash Reports in various states
Political Donors in federal and state elections
Inmate lookups
Court Case lookups
Workplace Accident Reports
Sex Offenders
Aircraft Owners

There's even a Lost and Stolen jewelry website.

And mixed in with all these modern-day records, you'll find a few oldies as well, such as state genealogy sites with birth certificates and death records back to the 1800's.

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.

Free Military Record Lookups

2009-10-13T19:59:00.000-04:00

Time for a review!

I've covered a few top-notch resources for looking up military records. The resources are all from either the US or UK. US lookups go back to the Revolutionary War, through the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. English records extend back centuries, all the way to the medieval times of knights and crusades.

Here's what we've got so far:

Forces Reunited: Searching UK Military Records. More than a million records available here.

The original G.I. Joe.

Free Civil War Military Records. This is one of the great internet resources for US military history.

Free World War II Military Records. Another great resource with millions of US enlistment records.

Medieval Soldier Military Records (That's right...Knights!). It's always amazing to find how well records were kept, even centuries ago, and how they've managed to find their way online.

National Gravesite Locator for Veterans. Find the burial locations of millions of US soldiers.

Revolutionary Era Genealogy Research. These tools from the Daughters of the American Revolution mix military and non-military records.

Some Civil War Genealogy Resources You May Not Know About. Pensioners lists, Confederate war reports, slavery records...a lot here to explore.

Some Military Family History Resources That You May Not Know About. Official US Army history sites can turn up a lot of useful genealogical information.

World War I and World War II British Commonwealth Deaths. A resource as vast as the British Empire itself, with records spanning the world.

Good hunting!

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.

Your Ancestors' Daily Life: Putting It In Context

2009-10-11T16:52:00.002-04:00

All right, you've been researching your family history and uncovering information on your ancestors from one, two or three generations back...maybe even more.

You have their names, dates, and hometowns, but now what? What was their life like? How did they live? Where did they do they shopping? What did a loaf of bread cost, or a pair of shoes?

Of course, the real details will come from personal records...journals, family bibles, house accounts, wills and estate records, and so on. But you can also get a feel for day-to-day living from several sources, including:

This is just an image, folks. Click on the text link to get to the real thing

The Inflation Calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows the value of a dollar in current terms, going back to 1913.

For an even broader perspective on daily finances, a site called Measuring Worth shows how the cost of living and the value of money has changed over decades, generations, and centuries. There are a lot of different data soruces here, and careful explanations of how to use (and not use) the data...take a look at this comparative record of gold prices from 1257-2008.

This collection of Historic Prices in Morris County, NJ (1900-2009) shows prices of goods advertised in the local newspaper, and how they changed over the decades.

If you (well, your ancestors, actually) were heading west in the mid-1800's, here's a detailed breakout of the costs of provisions for the Oregon Trail. The trip west could easily take six months, and require close to 2,000 pounds of cargo costing about $1,000.

From one of my new favorite online resources, Hathi Trust, here's some typical diner prices from 1910.

The Home Economics Archive -- Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH) is exactly what it sounds like, a digital collection at Cornell covering daily life and keeping a home during the years 1850 to 1925.

A good window on the life of new arrivals in the US can be found at Harvard University's Immigration Collection. Some beautiful materials here, both text and visual.

You can also learn a good deal from historical maps, like these detailed topographical maps covering much of the east part of the US.

And of course, you can get one of the most detailed views of daily life from the local newspapers of a given time and place. Check out the massive collection at NewspaperArchive.com, look into Google News Archives, and if you want to explore overseas, here's a terrific site for free international newspaper archives.

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 a subscription database, and one of the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Hathi Trust: A New and Important Genealogy Resource

2009-10-10T17:49:00.002-04:00

Every now and then a new resource comes along that just makes you go Wow!

The Hathi Trust Digital Library is just such a critter. The combined effort of dozens of universities around the US, the Hathi Trust boasts (and yeah...they're boasting!) of:

4,189,581 volumes
1,466,353,350 pages
156 terabytes
50 miles of materials weighing in at 3,404 tons.

Just one of the small treasures from Hathi Trust.

For family history researchers, this is an online goldmine...almost. Hathi Trust is still brand new, and not even formally launched yet. Think of it as a very powerful beta test.

To begin searching, go to the homepage and use the Catalog Search box. Search for anything (even the word anything)...it doesn't matter yet.

On their results page, upper right, you'll see text that says Try our experimental full-text search. That's the ticket! Click on that to get searching.

In searching for your family history at Hathi Trust, you can use both wildcards (? for a single character, * for multiple characters) and typical AND/OR Boolean searching. Thank the gods!

Like I said, a real gold mine, with presumably, much more to come. Start searching.

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.

Get Thousands of Free Books on Genealogy

2009-10-09T11:38:00.005-04:00

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.

Filling in Michelle Obama's Family Tree

2009-10-08T16:47:00.002-04:00

If you didn't see the article the other day on Michelle Obama's family history, it's worth a look.

The First Lady's roots are a fascinating glimpse into the challenges (and rewards) of African-American genealogy and reconstructing a past rooted in slavery. They present a story both ordinary and amazing, with it's end (so far) in the White House.

The NY Times, who pieced together the family tree with the aid of Megan Smolenyak, a professional genealogist, is hoping to fill in the blanks. And that's where you can help.

Anything you can add? The NY Times wants to hear from you.

Have a look at Michelle Obama's family tree, and see if you think you might have information on the places, people, and events that mark her heritage, both African American and Caucasian. The family tree is interactive...hovering over an item will pop-up additional information, and often has links to images of original documents. The Times will review any new information submitted to them, for possible inclusion in a future update to Ms. Obama's family history.

Perhaps you can add to this wonderful piece of work.

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.

Searching Free Online Historical Directories

2009-10-07T14:50:00.011-04:00

Someone (are you listening out there) should build a website with a comprehensive collection of free online historical directories.

Update: Well, whaddya know. Someone is building a directories website, both free and subscription. Thanks, Miriam.

These directories -- early versions of the Yellow Pages -- are wonderful sources for genealogy research. They include not only names and addresses, but typically focus on businesses and occupations. One of your ancestors may even have placed a 19th century advertisement for their feed store, stationery supplies, or their services as a surgeon or lawyer. There is good family history stuff in the pages of these directories, which also went by the name of Registers, Gazettes, and a few other assorted titles.

Who wants to contact non-living alumni, after all?

Happily, quite a number of historical directories have been digitized, and can be accessed online. But they're also scattered all over the place on the internet, so finding the directory or directories relevant to your family history is no easy task.

Here are a few resources to know about, though.

First, is the aptly-named UK Historical Directories website. These cover England and Wales for the period 1750 to 1919. The so-called Kelly's Directories are here, and are probably the most well-known British directory of the day. The site is a rich resource, but actual document search and retrieval is, unfortunately, on the slow and clumsy side. Still...awkward access is way better than no online access at all. If any branch of your family hails from the UK, you should have a look here.

On the other side of the Atlantic, you can find a good 19th century (1845-1875) collection of historical directories from Boston. Again, the overall usability of the site is less than ideal, but definitely worth wrestling with.

A collection of historical directories for Brooklyn, NY, but also including Manhattan, Queens and Long Island, span a broad period from 1796 to 1955. I did not see any actual page images at this site. Instead, you'll find text excerpts from old directories throughout the NYC area, along with some links to similar listings at other sites.

There are a ton of historical directories at Google Books, like this copy of the UK Medical Register of 1868 or the 1911 Directory of Alumni of Princeton University. Or have a look at the 400-plus-page New England historical and genealogical register of 1921, just below. You can search or scroll through it right here (but don't scroll fast or it won't load...you're better off using pg dn)

You'll have to search the Google Books site for other examples of directories. Try using Advanced Search to look for terms like Directory or Register or Gazette in the title of the book, and set dates to focus on historical publications. You might want to try a similar search at the Making of America site, as there are many directories there also.

The Genealogy Indexer has a surprisingly robust collection of directories, mostly from East Europe (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Galicia (Spain), Lithuania, etc) though there are also a few from other countries. The time span is broad as well, from the early 1800's to the 1950's. And I'm happy to say, I like the search tool here. By the way, there are some good non-directory resources at the site as well, especially for those with Jewish ancestors.

Ancestry.com (of course) has the largest collection of online directories, with more than 4,000 digital documents to speak of. They're not free, but worth noting just the same.

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 NewspaperArchive.com, a subscription database, but one of the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Finding Ancestors and Relatives in the World of Business and Finance

2009-10-06T22:05:00.001-04:00

Now don't get me wrong. There's no easy way to find out if one of your ancestors invested in the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637, or how much your family lost in the Great Panic of 1893. But there are ways to search millions of more recent records from business and finance, with the possibility of finding out something about one of your ancestors or relatives.

Here are the best sources I know of:

EDGAR. The Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system at the SEC is a huge (and I don't use that word loosely) source of information on companies, and the people in them, especially executives and major investors. The EDGAR Full Text Search covers just the past four years of business reports, but includes the names of millions of people from both US and foreign companies. You can retrieve company reports going back to the 1990's, but there's no easy way at EDGAR to search through text older than four years.

Famous rich guy, J.P. Morgan, and no, that's not a knife he's holding.

NARA Business and Financial Archives. There are some big honkin' business databases at the National Archives as well, but not all of them contain names of individuals. Take a look in particular at:

Records of Prime Contracts Awarded by the Military (8 million records, 1975-2003)
Records on Trading of Securities by Corporate Insiders (5.5 million records, 1978-2001)
Records of Contracts Awarded by Federal Agencies (8 million records, 1978-1997)

Jigsaw. The service at jigsaw.com is the best business contacts database I know of, with more than 16 million records. Since these are up-to-date records, you won't find anything on ancestors here, but you certainly might find distant, still-living family members. A name search is free, and returns useful information. For instance, a search on Jason Bourne turns up a listing at the CIA (for real!). But to get a full listing, you'll have to subscribe to the Jigsaw service.

MissingMoney. For a wide variety of reasons (including passing on), people sometimes leave behind unclaimed assets -- bank accounts, insurance policies, pensions, and so on. Your relatives might be on the list here. Enter their name in the search box, and enter ZZ for the state to conduct a national search. (And as long as you're here, search on your own name as well...something might turn up!).

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.

Free Lookups in the Dictionary of American Family Names

2009-10-05T09:29:00.005-04:00

The Dictionary of American Family Names, from Oxford University Press, is one of those must-have resources for serious genealogists. Each entry gives a detailed origin of a family's surname, describing its various meanings, geographical origins, and the context in which it arose.

In fact, the venerable Genealogy Bulletin says "it belongs in every library in America , particularly those who cater to genealogists".

Too bad the danged thing cost hundreds of dollars for the three-volume hard copy set.

Happily though, you can get online access to DAFN absolutely free, using the Surname Lookups at Ancestry.com
.
Getting there is a mite tricky. From the Ancestry.com homepage, just click on the tab labeled Search (or click on Search All Records from the pull-down menu). Once on the Search page, scroll down. Near the bottom, on the right hand side, is Other Resources, and just under that is Surname Distribution. That's the one you want...click there, and search on your surname.

As far as I can tell, the lookup includes all 70,000+ surnames from DAFN. Even more, you can also look up the etymology of first names...still at no charge. A pretty good deal!

For those having trouble finding the right page at Ancestry, here's an alternative link you can try.

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 NewspaperArchive.com, one of the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

Searching Your Musical Heritage

2009-10-04T11:29:00.000-04:00

Is there anyone in your family tree with musical talent? Here are a few places to check for ancestors and relatives who left their legacy as musicians.

Copyright records. The US Copyright Office keeps an online catalog of all materials registered for copyright since 1978, including, of course, lots of musical compositions. Don't be fooled by the 1978 date -- registrations cover much older materials, and involve people from the 19th and 20th centuries. Use the Set Search Limits feature if you want to search only on Music. Otherwise, your search will be for copyright-holders of any sort of materials.

Shake the family tree, and a fiddler may fall out.

ASCAP -- The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. This is a very large database of songs licensed by ASCAP. Try several searches for Writers, then Performers, and finally, for Publishers, to cover all your bases. Try a test search on Jolson to see results for Al Jolson.

BMI. Another music licensing organization with more than 400,000 artists represented. Search the Repertoire for musicians in your family tree.

HFA -- Harry Fox Agency. Yet another large licensing database for musicians.

SESAC -- License search, mostly for songwriters and publishers.

WorldCat. The online catalog of more than a billion holdings from libraries around the world can be searched for specific types of items, such as Sound Recordings, or Musical Scores. Use the Format option to select the type of items you want to search for.

Collectively, these data sources include many millions of names from around the world, spanning centuries of musical creativity. Your family might be in there, and searching is pretty easy, so why not take a look.

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.

A World of Free Newspaper Archives

2009-10-03T17:09:00.001-04:00

One very, very hot summer day years ago, a news reporter approached me, asked me how I was coping with the heat, and had her photographer snap a few photos. Next day, I was on the front page of the local newspaper!

Things like that happen, and they may well have happened to your family members and your ancestors. I'm a huge fan of searching through newspaper archives for information and stories about one's family history. Online newspaper archives are even better, since it's possible to search through millions of old articles in mere seconds, and free online archives are the best resource of all.

But searching millions of old newspaper articles is not without its challenges, and that's what today's post is about...making the most of free online newspaper archives.

My relatives made the Atlanta Constitution in 1913

The first challenge is where to search. I've covered Google News Archives, which is the most comprehensive collection available of free newspaper archives.

NewspaperArchive.com is another huge resource with tremendous coverage in the US and the UK back to the 1700's, and a smattering of items from elsewhere in the world, including some really unusual resources from places you might not expect, like China or Jamaica. This is a subscription service, but searching is free, as is a good deal of their content (front pages, for instance).

But regardless of how widespread these sources are, the truth is, there are thousands of discrete online archives that cover a particular geography or time period. Locating and using these to research your family history is much more of a challenge. But if you identify the right archives to research, they can be much more rewarding as well. Here are some important resources for free newspaper archives:

Southern States
NorthEast States
Midwest States
West Coast
International Newspaper Archives
Canada
UK
Australia and New Zealand
France (and other French language papers)
Magazine Archives
College Newspapers
Specialty Collections
(Labor Unions, Jewish History, African American/Slavery, Military History, Rural America, etc)

While it's great to have such widespread access to old newspaper articles, this diversity has its price. Each archive is different in terms of its interface, ease of use, searching protocol, and the types of materials retrieved. Some archives include images, for instance, while others are text-only.

Still, these are well worth exploring. Your ancestors and relatives are bound to be in there, somewhere.

Searching Cemetery Records at Interment.net

2009-10-01T08:53:00.000-04:00

Can you believe it's October already!

Time does fly, life is finite, and we all end up facing our maker, sooner or later.

And that's where Interment.net comes in. This site lists records from thousands of cemeteries around the world. Transcripts of cemetery records can be uploaded by anyone, so you never know quite what you might find at the site.

A typical cemetery record will include a brief description of the cemetery itself (often with driving directions), along with the actual inscriptions from gravestones. Since these are user-submitted transcripts, there's a lot of variability in the records.

The big storm of 1905!

It's difficult to say how large a dataset is here at Interment.net, but searching is easy, so it's certainly worth a look.

Most of the records appear to be from cemeteries in the US and Britain, although coverage is truly worldwide, and includes Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Mexico, Carribean, France, Japan and Cyprus, among others.

There are other important sites that allow searches of cemetery records, including Find a Grave, Deceased Online, and the Veteran's Gravesite Locator.

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.

State Vital Record Lookups

2009-09-30T17:53:00.006-04:00

A few states have taken their vital records online. These are mostly births and deaths, but sometimes marriages and divorces as well. Diligent state bureaucrats or dedicated volunteers from historical societies and the like have entered millions of records into online databases or better yet, scanned actual images of birth or death certificates, and all the wonderful information they contain.

And they've done all this for your benefit, just so you can look up vital records online, and fill in more of your family history.

The best of what the states have to offer are listed here, in reverse alphabetical order (because why should WV always be last?):

West Virginia Death Index 1917-1958. Coverage here varies by county; also includes some birth and marriage indexes. Actual images of certificates available.

Washington State Digital Archives. There are birth, death and marriage records here, along with census information, military records, and a host of other information. Coverage is very variable.

Utah Death Index, 1905-1956. Database includes digitized images of the death certificates. Also check out the Utah Burials Search.

Oregon Death Index, 1903-1930. Basic information here: Name, date of death, county, and certificate number.

Ohio Death Index, 1913-1944. Just the basics here. Lookup is free, the certificate will cost you.

North Dakota Department of Health's Death Index from 1881-one year before present. You must specify date of death within a ten year period in order to get search results (why oh why did you do that, NDDOH?).

And big enough that I'm counting it as a state, even though it's only a city, here is the New York City Death Index for 1891-1948

Missouri Death Certificates, 1910-1958 (with images). Also check out pre-1910 birth (including stillbirths) and death records.

Minnesota Death Certificates, 1904-2001, from the Minnesota Historical Society. Search and results are free, but there is a charge for an actual copy of the death certificate. You can also search the Minnesota state census for 1849-1905.

The Maryland State Archives Death Index (1898-1951) offers county by county lookups of death records. There are also separate databases for Baltimore covering death records from 1875-1972. The set-up here is cumbersome, but worth playing around with if you have family history in Md.

Kentucky's online vital records include a death index (1911-1992) and a marriage and divorce index for 1973-1993. Information is largely limited to name, place and date, with pointers to the original off-line files.

Illinois State Archives has a pretty incredible collection of not only birth and death records, by poorhouse records, court case, probates, and much more. Their Global Search allows name-searching of all databases at once.

Idaho's digital archives include death records, though these appear to be excerpts from the freely available SSDI database.

Delaware's online Probate Records Database offers up a hodge-podge of personal history usually having to do with a person's death, and the disposition of their estate. Click on Preface for an explanation of the database

The Arizona Genealogy Birth and Death Certificates site is very nice, very fast, and includes actual images of birth and death certificates for births that occurred at least 75 years ago, and deaths that occurred at least 50 years ago. In addition to including individual names, the database lookup includes parents' names as well.

Most online vital record lookups are organized at city or county, rather than state level. Here's a good list of local death records online.

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.

One-Name Studies

2009-09-29T15:21:00.002-04:00

Most people researching their family history are hoping to find out more about...well...about their family history.

But a select group of researchers want to take it even further, and find out everything there is to know about their surname. Doesn't make a difference how distantly related someone with the surname is to you. In fact, makes no difference if they're related at all. If they have the same name, you want to know about them.

Thus was born GONS -- the Guild of One-Name Studies. Yes, that really is what they're called, and yes, the guild members are devoted (fanatical?) researchers learning everything there is to know about a single name.

And if that name happens to be your name, then you've hit a goldmine. Contact the appropriate guild member, swap names, and soon you'll be learning more than you ever thought possible about the clan Clulee, the far-flung Fantrop's or Farrissey's, the world of the Welbelove's, or the guild of Gubben's.

Just don't go looking for Smith's. The GONS-people tend to focus on unusual surnames, which makes good practical sense. It would take several lifetimes to compile a list of all Smith's, but Smythesonne's can be handled with a reasonable commitment of time and effort.

Here is the master lookup list of one-name study surnames.

The site has a definite UK focus, but surnames will go where they will, eh wot? There are some intriguing resources here, so do some exploring when you visit GONS.

Happy hunting.

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

Also take a look 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.

Online Genealogy in Your Local Library

2009-09-28T15:23:00.001-04:00

If you are digging into your family history, then you're a researcher at heart, which means -- almost by definition -- that you love libraries. But many old-fashioned library-lovers haven't yet fully explored all the free online resources that libraries make available these days. There are some great online library tools for family history research, starting with...

WorldCat. True to it's name, this is an enormous catalogue of 1.4 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries around the world.

WorldCat is a useful family history database in its own right -- a search on your family surname, or on a particular individual, may well turn up new information. Beyond just author, illustrator, editor names, this enormous database includes millions of names of people mentioned as subjects in books. You may be surprised at what you find.

Reading Room, NY Public Library

And of course, WorldCat is also a book-finder, showing you which libraries carry a particular item you're looking for, and even sorting them by distance from your hometown (but if you don't want to make the trip, ask your local library to arrange for an interlibrary loan).

Your public library is another fantastic online resource. Most libraries subscribe to numerous databases, including history, newspaper archives, and genealogy services, that patrons can use for free. My local library, for instance, offers links to Heritage Quest, Historic Newspapers, several Whos Who, and people-find service like Reference USA. All for free!

And if your local library doesn't have the database you need, there are ways to access the subscription resources at other libraries, across the state, or across the country. Check out this article on remote access to subscription services at public libraries.

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

See if your library has free access to Ancestry.com and NewspaperArchive.com. These are subscription databases, but they are among the most powerful research tools available for looking into family roots.

The 10 Million Club: Genealogy's Largest Databases

2009-09-27T10:07:00.008-04:00

The following family history databases share a few things in common:

They're huge, with no less than 10 million names on record
They're absolutely free
They're easy to use, so you can visit, look up a name, and either find it or not, all in the space of a minute or so.

I guess they really did ride these things!

Social Security Death Index (80 million)

Ellis Island (22.5 million plus millions more from related records)

FamilySearch (325 million)

World War II Enlistment Records (9 million, but I included it anyway)

Washington Archives (26 million), one of the best digital state archives

Pilot Project from FamilySearch (many millions, though actual number not published)

Grave and Burial Records (35 million)

Jewish records at Ancestry.com (26 million -- this subset of Ancestry's collection is available at no charge)

WorldConnect (over 575 million)

GenCircles (12 million)

Genealogical Records Committee (GRC) at the DAR (35 million)

UK Census and Vital Records (over 200 million)

Obituaries (over 20 million) -- preliminary search is free

And not free, but so big that I have to mention it anyway:

Ancestry.com (8 billion-with-a-b!)

The above databases, besides being enormous, are also organized for name lookup. That is, you can enter a first-name and last-name in the appropriate search boxes, and pull up records precisely for that name.

Some important family history databases also have name information, but not exclusively. For instance, a search on Black or Francisco or Carpenter will pull up people with that name, but also thousands of other mentions of the word in other contexts. Still, these are huge databases containing millions of names, and should not be overlooked. They include:

Google News Archives

Google Books

And again, not a free service, but so big that it warrants mention:

NewspaperArchive.com

If anyone knows of other data sets that should be included here, please mention it in comments, and I'll look it over. Thanks.

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

Family and Cultural Heritage in Europe

2009-09-26T10:19:00.000-04:00

Is your family history tied to Europe at all? Even if you consider yourself Chinese, African, Indian, Palestinian or any other very non-European heritage, odds are there's a bit of European history mixed in with your family somewhere along the line.

A very extensive collection of Europeana can be found at...Europeana!

There is a lot of material here from several hundred sources throughout Europe. Museums, libraries, universities, governments and cultural institutions have all collaborated to create an easy-to-use single point of access to a vast swath of European history and culture.

Sayid Mahid, back in the day

Truth be told, the odds of actually finding a family connection in the Europeana collection are slim...the emphasis here is on the famous people, artifacts and icons of the ages. But searching is easy and quick, so the archives here are definitely worth a look.

And if you're at all like me, you'll enjoy getting sidetracked in history, even if your great great grandma isn't anywhere in sight.

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.

The Genealogy Research Process

2009-09-25T16:26:00.001-04:00

Here at the Free Genealogy Tools blog, we're usually seeking out large databases where you can search family history online, for free.

But today, something a little different... a nicely organized and sort of lovely visual aid to effective genealogical research.

Mark Tucker, who runs a nice site over at ThinkGenealogy.com has put together a visual chart that lays out the research process to use as you try to discover family relations in the past, and just as importantly, as you document your discoveries and insure that you have credible information.

Visit ThinkGenealogy.com for the full-sized version of the chart

The chart itself, the Genealogy Research Process is based on concepts laid out by professional genealogical certification programs. At 9+ MB, it's a sizable download, so be prepared. But this is a PDF worth having, and maybe even printing out and sticking up on the wall.

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.

The Searching Beauty of Odd Names

2009-09-24T17:49:00.001-04:00

I had to get in touch with an acquaintance, and all I knew was his first name. I hoped I could find him on the internet. Impossible, you say, to Google someone just knowing their first name? Actually, I found him in about five minutes, and pulled up his full name, mailing address, email, place of work, and several phone numbers.

It helped immensely that his first name is Bezad. Had he been a William or Michael or David, all would be lost.

But that's the beauty of rare names. They are very, very easy to search on. Whether you're looking for a modern day associate, or a long-ago ancestor in your family history, try zeroing in on the ones with the most unusual first or last names. An oddly named great-great grandfather, grandmother, uncle, or 19th-cousin-thrice-removed (whatever that means) might turn up in a flash from a simple internet search, leading to other family members with more pedestrian monikers.

There's a Bezad in there somewhere!

Here are some good search tools for the odd ducklings in your family tree, if I may mix a metaphor or two.

Google, Google Books, and Google News Archives should all be searched independently. Try searching the first and last name with and without quotes around it...the quotes tell Google to look for an exact phrase, rather than for pages that have both names anywhere on the page (if that doesn't make sense, don't worry about it...just try the searches). If you're looking for an amazingly unusual name, then just a single name -- first or last -- may be enough.

Searching on that single name, Bezad, turns up about 6,000 hits in Google, 300 in Google Books, and almost 100 in Google News Archives. Although there's certainly overlap between the lists, each search has its own potential for important revelations. The searches in books and old newspapers, in particular, can uncover materials hundreds of years old.

If your oddly-named ancestor lived somewhere other than the US, you might want to try exploring newspaper archives from other areas of the world. Head to the excellent list of International Newspaper Archives at XooxleAnswers, and start exploring. Each newspaper listed there is different, in terms of how to search, what time periods are covered, and whether or not there is an English version of the search interface. You'll just have to poke around, and see what turns up. There are archives in places you might not imagine, like Iceland and Estonia, and records, in a few countries (take a look at France!) that go back to the 1600's!

You can search even more newspaper archives (both US and international) at NewspaperArchive and Ancestry. These are commercial sites, but still, there is so much excellent content at each, that they are worth exploring, even if you never actually subscribe.

Lastly, don't forget to look through current sources, like phone books and such. Here's a great list of free people-find tools for just such a search.

Revolutionary Genealogy Research

2009-09-23T18:51:00.002-04:00

The Daughters of the American Revolution -- the venerable D.A.R -- has one of the most comprehensive and well-respected collections of genealogical resources in the United States. Just about all of it is hard-copy or microfilm, meaning you'll have to visit the main DAR library in Washington, DC to take full advantage of their resources.

However...there are two free, online resources from the DAR that you should definitely take a look at.

The first is the DAR Online Library Catalog. A search here on an exact name or surname will quickly show any library holdings that are by, or about, the name in question. If you're familiar with my Bourne Test, I turned up 50 Bourne's in the catalog.

Molly Pitcher, famous Revolutionary War gal

Just as easy to search, but a seemingly much larger dataset, is that of the GRC -- the Genealogical Records Committee of the DAR. There are more than 35 million names recorded here, including 607 Bourne's in New York, alone (and thousands in the US, though the search results max out at 1,000).

From what I can tell, other libraries (such as FamilySearch.org) have copies of the GRC records, but do not have the full index that is available at the DAR GRC lookup page.

The DAR library also has special collections devoted to African-American, Native American, and Jewish family history resources. Might be worth a visit, if your heritage lies along those lines.

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.

More English, Irish, Scottish, UK-ish Family History Tools, for Free

2009-09-22T20:40:00.006-04:00

Here are some more very useful and free genealogy resources in the UK. I bet you didn't know about some of these:

British History Online is one of those half-free, half-not-free services. There are a ton of historical resources here, and you can get preliminary results at no cost. Searches routinely turn up church records, local government surveys and reports, legal documents, and so on. In good British fashion, records go back about 1,000 years! Do a general search on a family name, or an exact search (use the Advanced Search feature) to fine-tune your results.

The Great Fire of London, 1666 (click to enlarge)

Similarly, the UK National Archives also offers quasi-free access to birth-marriage-death records, wills, citizenship information, passenger lists, etc. Searches will turn up a detailed description of each document, but there's a fee to see and download the actual document itself.

You can search through a century's worth of The Guardian newspaper (1899-1999), and it's totally free. Results are full text-only, rather than actual page images.

Drop back another century with more newspapers, semi-free, at the British Library British Newspapers collection (1800-1900). Some of the content here is totally free, but most of it will show only a snippet with your search term. There's a charge for the full image, though. This is an extensive resource with two million pages from dozens of publications, from the Aberdeen Journal to the Western Mail (Wales). It is well-worth a visit.

Irish Newspaper archives (1846-present) are also online, though you see only a tiny snippet of search results, unless you pay for the full article.

UK Gazettes, from London, Edinburgh and Belfast report on official government activities going back to 1665. There are an endless number of bankruptcies recorded here, among other events. From the looks of things, millions of individuals are named in these documents.

Whatever English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh roots your family history has, they're probably mentioned in these resources, somewhere.

Isn't the internet wonderful?

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.

Bring Out Your Dead

2009-09-21T19:38:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the morbid headline. I know Monty Python fans will forgive me, though.

Every now and then a new website comes along that seems worth keeping an eye on. Deceased Online is one such site.

As the name suggests, this is a lookup service for the names of the dead, in this case, the deceased from UK and Irish death records. As Deceased Online puts it, the site is a "central database for UK burials and cremations"".

Records don't go back to the Black Death,
but you can get 19th century information

This is a growing site, that currently houses a bit under half a million records from 1837 onward. They are adding new records regularly, from more than 3,000 burial authorities and almost 250 crematoria in the UK and Ireland.

Searching here is free, and results will give you a name, date and place of passing, the final disposition of the body (whether buried or cremated, and at which authority). For a fee, additional information is available, including scans of the actual register pages and remembrance pages, and more precise information about the actual gravesite.

This is a pretty rich resource, and one worth checking out.

Also 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.

Free Genealogy Tools: Our Story So Far

2009-09-20T11:15:00.005-04:00

Every few weeks, we do a quick recap.

The Free Genealogy Tools blog is devoted to discovering genealogy resources that are free, high-quality, and not always well-known, even to aficionados of family history research.

Here's what we've highlighted so far:

Google News Archives -- 300 Years of Free Newspaper Articles

Immigration Records from Ellis Island, Castle Garden, etc.

SSDI -- More than 80 million death records

Free Civil War Military Records

FamilySearch.org from the Mormons

Free Newspaper Archives and Historical Articles

Free World War II Military Records

Buffalo Bill, 1875

Medieval Soldier Military Records (That's right...Knights!)

Millions of Family History Records from Canada

Immigrants from Europe

New York City Family History

National Gravesite Locator for Veterans

World War I and World War II British Commonwealth Deaths

Search Millions of Ancestor Records in an Instant (with free Census info, to boot)

Search 35 Million Grave, Burial, and Cemetery Records for Free

Half a *billion* free records from Ancestry.com, at WorldConnect

Five Centuries of British Family History Records

Proceedings of the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London

Finding Free Obituaries

Finding People Who Are Still Living

Searching for Family History in Old Books, Online and For Free

Some Civil War Genealogy Resources You May Not Know About

Family History in Free Online Photo and Film Archives: Part I

What's In a Name? More Than You Think!

Some Military Family History Resources That You May Not Know About

Family History Grab Bag!

The Painful-Yet-Worthwhile Making of America

Family History Research at the National Archives: More Online Than You Know

Free Lexis-Nexis for Family History Research

Anacleto Ebooks: Worth a Look for a Quick Family History Search

How Popular Are You? (In a Family History Sense, That Is)

What the Bourne Identity Can Tell You About Your Family History (Really!)

Happy Birthday, Ancestors

Free Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The Family History Archives at BYU

Searching Ships Passenger Lists

Forces Reunited: Searching UK Military Records

Geographical Origins of a Million Surnames

Connecting to Ancestors at GenCircles

African-American Family History: Slaves and Slavery

Finding the Book(s) on Your Family History

Are You Royalty?

Immigrants and Visitors to Australia

A Peek Through European History

(Almost) Free Obituaries

Latvia Vital Records of the Late 19th, Early 20^th Centuries

Family History in Free Online Photo and Film Archives

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

Family History in Free Online Photo and Film Archives: Part II

2009-09-19T18:55:00.002-04:00

Finding mention of your ancestors as you search for family history is always a thrill. But it's hard to beat the excitement of finding actual photographs of long-gone relatives. In Part I of this post, I covered searching old film and video (moving images). Now it's time to look at resources for still photography.

Corbis is one of the largest commercial sources of modern and historical photos, and includes the fabulous Bettmann Archives among other collections. There is an enormous amount of historical material here, mostly of the rich and famous, but with a surprising amount of the everyday mixed in.

A bountiful bevy of Bournes (click to enlarge)

You can search Corbis at no cost, and see watermarked versions of the photos available. Use the More Search Options to limit results to particular dates, locations or collections (such as Archival photos).

A search on Bourne, for instance (see my earlier post for the importance of the Jason Bourne test in genealogy) turns up a few shots of actor Matt Damon, certainly (he plays Bourne in the movies). But there are also many hundreds of other Bourne's including:

1953: Young Linda Bourne helps her mother (Ivy Bourne) hang nappies...
Historical engraving by Herbert Bourne
Francis Alphonsus Cardinal Bourne, Archbiship of Westminster in 1903
Colonel Bourne, 1936 Oxford rowing coach
A portrait of an unheralded Frederick Bourne, mid-19th century
An 1860's photo of the Himalayas by Samuel Bourne
Dale Bourne, 1930's golfer

Other photo sources to explore are:

Getty Images, similar to Corbis, and good for a few hundred more Bournes

Genealogy Images of History is an odd collection, chiefly from the US, but there's actually quite a bit here, making it well worth a search. You can see a watermarked version of images, mostly from old newspapers, and can, of course, purchase the full image.

The NY Public Library's digital images collection contains more than 700,000 images, including close to a hundred Bournes.

And don't forget a search at Google Images and Flickr. These are vast repositories of images, and are easy to search. Each has many thousands of Bournes, mostly contemporary, but you never know what might turn up!

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.