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History & Reference | |
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The 101 Best Family History Web Sites: 2004 Index | |
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August 2004 Issue | |
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History & Reference
American Civil War Portal Bartleby.com Canadian Genealogy and History Cyndi's List eHistory Genealogy Resources on the Internet Genealogy Today Global Gazetteer LibDex Library of Congress Making of America Our Roots Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection Find news and reviews on more great Web sites in the August 2004 Family Tree Magazine.
Paid Content
www.americancivilwar.info
Explore your Civil War ancestor's world at this handsome site, which offers thousands of links, a photo database, battle reports, regimental histories and message boards.
www.bartleby.com
Imagine having your grandfather's library in searchable, digital form. That's Bartleby.com, where you can pop into pages of the past, ranging from the Harvard Classics to Fanny Farmer's cookbook. Also click here for a few more-modern reference works, such as the Columbia Encyclopedia and Gazetteer, the World Factbook and the Encyclopedia of World History.
www.islandnet.com/~jveinot/cghl/cghl.html
A perfect portal for researching your Canadian roots, this Web site serves up nearly 2,000 categorized, linked listings reaching from the Atlantic provinces to the Northwest Territories.
www.cyndislist.com
Still the queen of genealogy-links lists, Cyndi Howells' mammoth collection of categorized sites—more than 230,000 in 150-plus categories—makes it the Yahoo! of family history.
Early Canadiana Online
www.canadiana.org
A digital library of Canada's history, from the first European settlers to the early 20th century, Early Canadiana Online is an ever-growing collection of more than 1.5 million pages from more than 8,600 volumes. You can search and access many of those tomes for free; a subscription ($55 annually) is required for the 727,000-page Early Official Publications collection.
www.ehistory.com
Now under the aegis of Ohio State University, eHistory offers more than 130,000 pages of historical content, 5,300 timeline events, 800 battle outlines, 350 biographies and thousands of images and maps. Most notable here for those with Civil War ancestors are the searchable 128 volumes of the conflict's Official Records (OR).
www.rootsweb.com/~jfuller/internet.html
Kudos to Chris Gaunt and John Fuller for creating and maintaining this guide to the other genealogy goodies accessible via the Internet: mailing lists, newsgroups, and Telnet and Gopher sites. In particular, it's the best place to find mailing lists catering to your areas of ancestral inquiry, from geographical locations to surnames to special interests such as occupations.
genealogytoday.com
This all-purpose site offers tips and resources geared for all levels of expertise—even "junior genealogists"—plus state-by-state links.
www.calle.com/world
One of our favorite "undiscovered" online resources, this simple-but-deep site is now running on updated software. Just a few clicks will find the name of that elusive ancestral town, from Aberdeen to Zwickau.
www.libdex.com
Looking for a library in your ancestral hometown? Search or browse this index to 18,000 libraries worldwide. LibDex includes links to some libraries' online catalogs.
www.loc.gov
The site for the nation's library includes such glimpses into history as the American Memory Project, a collection of more than 7 million digital items spanning 100-plus collections, and the Prints and
Photographs Online Catalog, wherein about 90 percent of entries are accompanied by digital images. Don't overlook the library's regular catalog as a reference to pretty much any book you'll ever need, and the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), which indexes manuscripts placed in repositories nationwide since 1986.
www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp
OK, we're cheating a bit here. This is really a pair of sister sites—the other is at library5.library.cornell.edu/moa—both serving up searchable digitized material from the 19th century. The University of Michigan version contains 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles; recent additions include 149 volumes focusing on New York City. The Cornell site encompasses more than 250 monograph volumes and 100,000 journal articles, plus the OR of naval activity during the Civil War.
www.ourroots.ca
As evidenced by the wealth of sites in this category, our neighbors to the north really know what they're doing when it comes to putting their heritage online. This slick multi-media celebration of Canadian local histories brings to life tales of the Irish at Grosse ėle (see page 47), the American invasion of 1775, the Klondike Gold Rush, historic forts and trading posts, and much more.
www.lib.utexas.edu/maps
When it comes to maps, this University of Texas library collection is as big as the Lone Star State. The collection comprises mostly historical, out-of-copyright maps—perfect for genealogical purposes. Whether you need a guide to Sioux Falls, SD, streets circa 1920 or a map of 1882 Italy, you're likely to find it among the 5,000-plus cartographic creations
digitized here.
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