Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Top 10 Free Genealogy Sites

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It's Saturday Night again -

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

 
Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing:

1) Last week we defined our top 5 or 10 fee-based genealogy websites.  This week, let's define our Top 10 Free Genealogy Websites!

2)  List your Top 10 (or 20 if you want!) FREE based genealogy sites, and a short reason for listing them.

3)  Share your list on your own blog, in a comment on this post, or on Facebook.  Please leave a link to your list wherever it is.

Here's my Top 10:

1.   FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org). There are so many images of original records available on FamilySearch that cover most counties in all 50 states, as well as Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. I have found such records as births, baptism, marriages, deaths, burial, deeds, tax records, probate, and court records from the U.S., Canada, Germany, England, and Sweden. When they first started out, they had mostly indexes, but now there are so many images, digitized from their microfilm and digitized from cameras. They are still adding more records! I usually start by searching from the catalog by place to see what they have, but there are also some very nice state-wide collections on their search records page.

2.   Find a Grave (https://www.findagrave.com). This site has over 190 million memorials, many of them with images of the gravestones. It is crowd-source, so there can be errors, but it is a great place to view images of our family’s tombstones and see hints to familial relationships. However, remember, the memorials themselves are a secondary source, especially if there is no photo of the stone. I have created some memorials of family and have been given administration rights to others, but I have no desire to rack up a big list. I’m just happy a site like this exists.

3.   Chronicling America (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/). One of my favorite spots for finding newspapers from 1923 and earlier. There are some papers after 1923. They have both big-city and small-town newspapers. The best part is the U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-present, where you can discover what newspapers were published in a place your ancestor lived. It might not be digitized on this site, or any other, but it might be possible to view the paper via microfilm at a local library or university.

4.    The Portal to Texas History (https://texashistory.unt.edu/) This site has a large collection of newspapers from lots of towns and cities in Texas, as well as maps, photos, county records, yearbooks, etc. I have been pleased with the images of the newspapers from Comanche and Erath Counties, where my Johnston, Loveless, Lancaster, Coor, and Hutson families lived.

5.   Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records (https://glorecords.blm.gov/) If your ancestor had land in the federal land states, this site is very valuable. There are images of land patents, land surveys, field notes of the surveys, and tract books. Even if your ancestor wasn’t the first to own the land, the images of what the land looked like in surveys is valuable. The site is slowly linking the tract books to the land which is very helpful. These books are available on FamilySearch but it is tedious to browse in them. The images of the tract books on the BLM site are in color, too!

6.   Missouri Digital Heritage (https://www.sos.mo.gov/mdh). If you have Missouri ancestors, this site run by the Secretary of State, is full of images. I have used the death certificate images 1910-1969 extensively, but there are lots of other useful databases covering economics, government, genealogy, native tribes, etc.

7.   Verein für Computergenealogie (https://genealogy.net/). This is a must-use genealogy site for German genealogy. Parts of the site are only in German and in other parts, one can choose the British flag to translate into English. Use the Metasearch to search through all of their databases.

8.   Meyers Gazetteer (https://www.meyersgaz.org/) is a wonderful tool to get around trying to read the Meyers-Ort Gazetteer in the old Fractur alphabet. It also identifies the meanings of the many abbreviations used in the Gazetteer.

9.   ArchiveGrid (https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/) is a search engine for many archives in the U.S. and around the world. They currently have over 5 million records describing archival materials. These may be available digitally, or you’ll have to contact the facility for an appointment to visit or perhaps the ability to get a copy of what you need. The records they describe come from university libraries and archives, archives, historical societies, and museums.

10.  National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/) and Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/). These are tied. Both provide lots of textual and visual images about all sorts of subjects. The National Archives catalog and Descriptive Pamphlets help us understand many of the images found on Ancestry and Fold3. The Library of Congress section “The Century of Law Making” at https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/ has all of the early statutes and business records of Congress. Many of the images found on the site are copyright free to use.

These are some of the many sites I have used in my genealogy research and have used to supplement my research with historical and cultural context. I recommend these highly.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.