Genealogy Resource Sites
Where can I find that land record in South Dakota? Is there a list of genealogists who specialize in DNA? Is there websites to help me learn how to organize all my work? Where are records for Italy held?
Ever ask yourself these questions? If not, I am sure you have other questions you are asking yourself as you try to find resources to help you with your family research. What if I told you there are sites to help you find your answers? And what if I told you they are free to use? Well, there are sites and they are free to use!
FamilySearch.org’s Wiki is a great resource to find out where records are held on any site, not just FamilySearch.org. If you go to the Search drop down menu and click on Research Wiki, a new world has just opened for you.
You can either type a name, place, or event into the Search box or click on a continent, then pick a country. Either way, you end up on a page where you can click on the box Online Genealogy Records.
The links are for any site, and they let you know if it is behind a pay wall or not. Clicking on the blue link will take you to the search page for the record.
There is another great feature on this page (as well as on the main page for the country you chose from the home Wiki page). On the far right is a listing of some extremely useful information ranging from getting started with research to history, to a genealogical word list towards the bottom of the box. It offers a downloadable PDF of the words, as well as other pertinent information to understanding the language.
There is another website that can help with just about everything related to genealogy. It is called Cyndi’s List and is available at www.cyndislist.com There are hundreds of categories and more subcategories than I care to count!
Clicking on African-American gives you a large selection of subcategories to choose from. Selecting Freedman’s Bank gives you more specific subcategories.
Choosing “FamilySearch - Registers of signatures of depositors in branches of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, 1865-1874” brings me to the search page on FamilySearch.
Randomly selecting a page from the available digitized records produces this page of the book.
These two sites are the two best known sites for genealogists to go to for records searches. But there are other lesser-known ones that are just as helpful. Here are just a few of them with the links to their sites.
· The Ancestor Hunt: https://theancestorhunt.com/ Kenneth R. Marks offers paid and free resources for so many things you need. If you subscribe to his free newsletter, or like him on Facebook, you will get free Quicksheets with links. His expertise lies in Newspaper research and IT, as well as so many other subjects.
· The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/ Internet Archive allow you to search for just about anything about anything. In the search box (below the Wayback Machine search box), type in what you want and it will find it for you. This is my go to when I am looking for city directories anywhere in the US. The Wayback Machine is a part of Internet Archive, but looks for websites that are no longer available. You can use this when you go to a page and get the dreaded Error 404 Page Not Found. Copy the link and paste it in the Wayback Machine search box. Remember how we are always being told that once you post something it never really goes away? Well, they are right and the Wayback Machine will take you “wayback” and bring you to the last updated page that existed.
· The US GenWeb Project: https://www.usgenweb.org/ US based only and some states are better represented than others. But is it worth the look to see if there are any links that can help you.
Next month, I will look specifically at newspaper search sites to help you find articles, obituaries and other stories about your ancestors.