10 Fabulous Sources for Family History Books Online
By Kimberly Powell, About.com Guide
Published family and local histories offer a potential rich source of information about your personal family history. Even if a family genealogy has not been published for your ancestors, local and family histories can offer insight into the places your ancestors lived and the people they may have encountered during their lifetime. Before you head to the local library or bookstore, however, take time to explore the hundreds of thousands of genealogies, local histories and other items of genealogical interest available online for free! A few major fee-based collections (clearly marked) are also highlighted.
1. BYU Family History Archive
The BYU Family History Archive, a free collection of over 17,000 family histories, local histories, city directories and other genealogy books online, is the result of a partnership of three major genealogical libraries - The Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library; and FamilySearch's Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Digitized books have "every word" search capability, with search results linked to digital images of the original publication. When complete, this massive digitization effort promises to be the most comprehensive collection of city and county histories one the Web. Best of all, access will remain free!
2. Google Books
Select "all books" to include books which allow viewing of over a million books, many out of copyright, but also others for which publishers have given Google permission to display limited book previews (which often includes the Table of Contents and Index pages, so you can easily check to see if a particular book includes information about your ancestor). The list of useful books, pamphlets, newspaper articles and ephemera that you might encounter includes many county histories and biographies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as family histories. See Find Family History in Google Books for tips and search suggestions.
3. HeritageQuest Online
HeritageQuest is a genealogical resource offered for free by many libraries across the United States and Canada. Most participating libraries even offer their patrons remote access from a home computer. The HeritageQuest book collection includes about 22,000 digitized family histories and local histories. Books are every-word searchable, or can be viewed page by page in their entirety. Downloading is limited to 50 pages, however. You generally won't be able to search HeritageQuest directly through this link - instead check with your local library to see if they offer this database and then connect through their site with your library card.
4. Internet Text Archive
The nonprofit Archive.org, which many of you may know for its Wayback Machine, also hosts a rich text archive of books, articles and other texts. The biggest collection of interest to family historians, is the American Libraries collection, which includes over 300 city directories and 1000 family histories free for searching, viewing, downloading and printing. The U.S. Library of Congress collection and Canadian Libraries collection also include genealogies and local histories.
5. Canadian Local Histories Online
The Our Roots project bills itself as the world's largest collection of published Canadian local histories. Thousands of digital copies in French and English are available online, searchable by date, subject, author or keyword.
6. Hathi Trust Digital Library
The Hathi Trust Digital Library hosts a large online (and free) Ancestry and Genealogy collection with searchable text and digitized versions of thousands of genealogy and local history books. The majority of the content is from Google Books (so expect a lot of overlap between the two), but there is a small, increasing percentage of books that have been locally digitized.
7. World Vital Records (subscription)
There are a lot of genealogy and local history books from around the world in the online Rare Genealogical and Historical Digitized Book Collection of subscription-based site, World Vital Records. This includes over 1,000 titles from Genealogical Publishing Company (including many focused on early American immigrants), several hundred books from Archive CD Books Australia (books from Australia, England, Scotland, Wales & Ireland), 400+ family history books from Canadian publisher Dundurn Group, and almost 5,000 books from Canadian-based Quinton Publications, including genealogies, local histories, Quebec marriages and biographical collections.
8. Ancestry.com - Family & Local History Collection (subscription)
Journals, memoirs and historical narratives, plus published genealogies and record collections make up the bulk of the 20,000+ books in the Family and Local Histories collection at fee-based Ancestry.com. Among the offerings are the Daughters of the American Revolution Series, slave narratives, biographies, genealogies and more gathered from genealogical society collections from around the U.S., as well as the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and the University of Illinois at Urbana. See the Family and Local Histories Learning Center for instructions and tips on how to best use the collection.
9. GenealogyBank (subscription)
Search historical books from the 18th and 19th centuries, including digitized versions of all available books, pamphlets and other publications printed in America before 1819.
10. Their Own Words
A digital collection of books, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, dating from the latter eighteenth through the early twentieth century, that reflects the history of the United States. The 50+ books in the collection include a few biographies, autobiographies, and military journals and regimental histories.
