Best FREE Genealogy Websites of 2017: US Genealogy Websites

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Florida Memory Project

One of the first and still one of the best state “memory” sites, this fount of Florida info includes photos, Confederate pension applications, voter rolls, Spanish land grants and even a streaming radio station with musical blasts from the past.

Georgia Archives Virtual Vault

Keep scrolling the deceptively simple list here, as the hits just keep on coming: Colonial wills, land grants, deed books, wills, Confederate pension applications and more.

Illinois State Archives

Find families from the Land of Lincoln with 11 military databases and indexes to deaths and pre-1900 marriages. Strike out? A guide to the Illinois Regional Archives Depositories (IRAD) will point you to offline resources.

LowCountry Africana

Research African-American ancestors from the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and northeastern Florida in this stylish site. Collections include plantation records, name changes, migrations and the 33rd US Colored Troops.

Massachusetts State Archives

Don’t let this site’s bare-bones welcome page fool you. Here you can search not only the Massachusetts Archives Collection Database of records from early Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire; but also indexes to Boston passenger arrivals (1848-1891) and births, marriages and deaths from across the Bay State (1841-1910).

Minnesota Historical Society

The Minnesota People Records Search (under the Research menu) has a new search form that makes it easy to look for ancestors in online collections including birth and death records, state censuses, veterans grave registrations and World War I bonus records. Nor should you miss the Digital Newspaper Hub or Voices of Minnesota oral histories.

Missouri Digital Heritage

Search more than 9 million records—vital records, naturalizations, military and more—here with a single click, or dive into individual collections.

Seeking Michigan

This sharp-looking site serves up death records (1897-1920), Civil War heritage, old photos, state censuses and more. Click Discover to start, well, discovering.

Virginia Memory

This Library of Virginia site includes land patents, military records, newspapers, photos and much more. A new Virginia Untold project tells individual stories of African-Americans in Virginia from the establishment of slavery in the 1600s to 1865.