Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Online Resources - Genealogy Book Collections

I try to keep lists of online resources for different categories to use in my Genealogy 101 Workshops and OASIS Beginning Computer Genealogy classes. Perhaps my lists will help other researchers (I love to share!). I'm updating my lists.

Here is a list of six large online genealogical and historical book collections (in order of free then subscription sites):

* Google Books (http://books.google.com/) -- Free, more than anybody else, I think! Entries can be found using Google Search engine. Book page images. PDF or text file can be downloaded. Books can be added to online personal Google library and read online.

* BYU Family History Archive (http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc) -- Free, more than 60,000 genealogy related books. Book page images. PDF file can be downloaded.

* Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/genealogy) -- Free, more than 17,000 genealogy related books, plain text obtained by OCR. Text file can be downloaded. Entries can be found using Search engines.

* HeritageQuestOnline (http://www.heritagequestonline.com/, accessed only through a subscribing library) -- Free through subscribing libraries, about 26,000 books. Book page images. Individual pages can be downloaded as JPG images.

* Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com/) -- Subscription required, more than 20,000 books. Book page images. Individual pages can be downloaded as JPG images.

* WorldVitalRecords (http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/) -- Subscription required, more than 9,000 books. Book page images. Individual pages can be downloaded as JPG images.

If a reader knows of more large genealogical and historical book collections, please let me know and I will add to the list above. Thanks!

3 comments:

Brenda Leyndyke said...

Thanks for sharing!

Unknown said...

Randy,

Check out Our Roots, a Canadian on-line reference library at http://www.ourroots.ca/e/. This is the link to the English version of the site but there is also a French version available. A great resource for Canadian ancestry.

Ian

Miriam Robbins said...

Hathi Trust Digital Library

Kirtas Books

Making of America - University of Michigan

Making of America - Cornell University

Project Gutenberg