I wrote about my "Top 5 Fee-based Genealogy Websites" and "Top 10 Free Genealogy Websites" in recent weeks, and several other genea-bloggers have written about them also - there are many links in the comments to those posts.
Of course, my "Top 5" or "Top 10" are probably different than everybody else because of differences in opinion, experience, education and ancestors locations. Every person searches the Internet for genealogy and family history resources in a different way.
A reader, Chuck Nesbit, emailed me with his own thoughts and they were cogent and highlighted his own experience and opinions, and added suggestions for regional and county resources in southern states. Here are Chuck's comments from several emails:
"I agree with your listings of the best free and paid genealogy websites for genealogists to use overall.
- Georgia Historic Newspapers - free site offering a large variety of historical Georgia papers. The goal of the project is to have at least one paper from each county. I use this much more frequently than Chronicling America or Newspapers.com: https://gahistoricnewspapers.
galileo.usg.edu. Georgia Historic Newspapers is part of the larger “Digital Library of Georgia”. https://dlg.usg.edu which includes maps, documents, and photographs.
- Georgia State Archives - Has many digital records in its 'virtual vault': https://vault.
georgiaarchives.org/digital/
- Digital Collections of the University of Georgia - https://www.libs.uga.edu/
magil/collections/digital- collections I’ve found many university libraries to be treasure troves of documents helpful to family history researchers.
- Digital NC is a portal allowing one to explore materials from 277 libraries and museums across the state: https://www.digitalnc.org
- NC Land Grants - The personal project of David McCorkle (site owner) provides searchable data for 216,000 land grants from 1663 through 1960. It includes 10,000 land grants issued by NC in what is now Tennessee. For researchers with colonial and early United States ancestors this is an invaluable resource with good search tools. https://nclandgrants.com
- The digital records of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina library provide numerous digitized collections of family papers and other records providing a wealth of information to genealogists. These records cover the entire southeastern US, not just North Carolina. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/
archivalhome/collection/00ddd
- North Carolina Digital Collections, a joint project of the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina provides numerous documents from various periods of North Carolina history which family history researchers can use to learn more about their ancestors and the communities in which they lived. https://digital.ncdcr.gov
- Duke University also has extensive online digital records, photographs, advertisements, and texts. https://repository.duke.edu/
dc
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro houses online the Digital Library on American Slavery. Its digital collections are invaluable for African American researches as well as white families who owned slaves. https://library.uncg.edu/
slavery/
Thank you to Chuck for taking the time to offer his thoughts to my readers. I appreciate it because I don't have Chuck's research experience in the southeast. Many of my readers, and society members, do have a research interest in southern state research and will appreciate Chuck's recommendations above, especially because they are FREE.
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4 comments:
It's interesting how we become experts in our areas of interest and have our own specific set of resources. It's why networking is so important - we can all help each other.
Thank you so much for sharing this information. I have only been truly dedicated to my research for 2 years. This is very insightful to assist me in my journey.
This is a very thoughtful post by Chuck. I had heard of Linkpendium but never really used it. I'm planning to bookmark it in Chrome where I can see it next to Ancestry & FamilySearch. I, too, have lots of southern research and appreciate Chuck's comments.
Yes, definitely, Randy! Chuck's southern perspective has been helpful to me, as well. Thank you, Randy, for sharing his comments--and thanks to Chuck for providing the information.
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