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Records Resources | |
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The 101 Best Family History Web Sites: 2003 Index | |
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August 2003 Issue | |
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Records Resources
Bible Records Online Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records Census Online eHistory Find A Grave Interment.net Newspaper Abstracts Obituary Central The Olden Times Where to Write for Vital Records Find news and reviews on more great Web sites in the August 2003 issue of Family Tree Magazine.
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www.biblerecords.com
Frustrated family history researchers, this site may be the answer to your prayers: Tracy St. Claire not only rescues family Bibles—she puts them online. At last count, this site was home to 718 Bibles representing 2,431 surnames. You can search the collection or browse by Bible or by surname.
www.glorecords.blm.gov
Answers to your ancestral puzzles may lurk in land records—this is the site to start unlocking them. You can search more than 2 million federal land—title records for Eastern public-land states (generally, Eastern states excluding the original 13 colonies) issued between 1820 and 1908. Land titles issued between 1908 and the mid-1960s, including those in Western states, are now being added. If you get a hit, you may be able to view a digitized image of your ancestor's land patent. Read more about this site in the October 2000 Family Tree Magazine.
www,census-online.com
This most complete and easiest-to-use guide to online census pages contains more than 36,000 links. Before you buy a census subscription, check here for free transcriptions.
www.ehistory.com
Easily overlooked because it's not strictly a genealogy site, eHistory serves up more than 130,000 pages of historical content, 5,300 timeline events, 800 battle outlines, 350 biographies and thousands of images and maps. A favorite resource here for Civil War buffs is, incredibly, the searchable 128 volumes of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. The "OR," as this mammoth work is affectionately known, is the authoritative reference to army operations during the Civil War.
findagrave.com
Among the best and biggest cemetery sites, Find A Grave lets you search 4.1 million grave records or look for specific cemeteries. You can also create virtual memorials and even add "virtual flowers" and a note to an ancestor's grave.
www.interment.net
Our other favorite cemetery site puts online more than 3.2 million records from nearly 7,000 cemeteries worldwide. Browse transcriptions by region and check out special collections of veterans cemeteries.
www.newspaperabstracts.com
Think of this as the USGenWeb (see above) for newspaper abstracts and extracts. Organized by state and county and depending on the flying fingers of volunteers, this site focuses on US newspapers prior to 1923. You'll also find some articles from other countries prior to 1900. The pages here now number more than 10,500.
www.obitcentral.com
Death is a lively topic here, with thousands of links to online obituaries; cemetery inscriptions; birth, marriage and death notices; and divorce records arranged by state and county, plus a collection of search engines that cover only obituaries.
theoldentimes.com
Unlike Newspaper Abstracts (see above), this is a one-man show—but it's an impressive site nonetheless. You'll find obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, ads and cartoons, all scanned from the Webmaster's collection of 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century newspapers from the United States, British Isles and Australia.
www.cdc.gov/nchs/howto/w2w/w2welcom.htm
This must-bookmark site gives instructions on obtaining copies of your ancestors' vital records: addresses, phone numbers, Web sites, costs. If the records aren't stored at the state level, it tells where to find them ("Contact Clerk of Circuit Court in county where divorce was granted," for example).
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