Traveling in our tin covered version of the pioneer wagon, gives us an opportunity to check out the places our ancestors traveled. On this page, I will be sharing lots of genealogy information that can be used while on the road. Come back and check out the web pages, hints and tips for Family History travels. Hope you will join me and contribute information you find of value in the comments section for all of us to use.
June 17, 2020
I found this article at Clark Condensed blog that had great information. Check it out for this and more intormation.
December 17, 2017
Are you researching a topic or your family history. The information at this site will give you an amazing amount of options for your search. Below is the article outlining the list. Below the article is the list categorized by state. Check this out to help in your search.
Open Education Data Base
http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/ (2017)
"Hundreds of libraries and archives exist online, from university-supported sites to accredited online schools to individual efforts. Each one has something to offer to researchers, students, and teachers. This list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.
The sites listed here are mainly open access, which means that the digital formats are viewable and usable by the general public. So, such sites as the Connecticut Digital Library (iCONN) are not listed, as they operate on the premise that the user has a Connecticut library card in his or her possession.Efforts were made to go to the root source for these collections. In other words, if you’re seeking the American Memory Project, which was created and housed at the Library of Congress, then you’ll find the link for the Library of Congress rather than the link for American Memory (although we included that link in the description of the Library of Congress listing). The root sources, in most cases, will lead you to collections that are too numerous to list here. In fact, it would be impossible to list all sources and we know we may have missed some favorites.
As a warning, many states listed their collections as “archives” when, in reality, the sources contained secondary sources such as books and transcriptions rather than a digital image of the actual document. Still, these resources can be invaluable for the person who seeks sources on family histories or on regional histories. To that end, we offer links to localized collections first, categorized by state. "
Alabama
Alabama Department of Archives and History: ADAH preserves records and artifacts of historical value to promote a better understanding of Alabama history. Genealogists, researchers, teachers and students can find databases, newspaper clippings, and more at this site on a wide variety of topics pertaining to Alabama’s past.
Alabama Mosaic: AlabamaMosaic is a repository of digital materials on Alabama’s history, culture, places, and people. They pull various resources from Auburn University, the Birmingham Public Library and more to offer these images online.
Auburn University Digital Library: Based in the Ralph Brown Draughon Library, AUDL draws on a variety of collections archives and makes them available to educators and students in Alabama and beyond. Some resources, like images and old postcards, are available online. Gain access to other materials through interlibrary loan.
Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections: These resources are focused on the local history of Birmingham and the surrounding area.
University of Alabama Digital Collections: Gain access to this institution’s digital collections including yearbooks, the Civil War diary of George S. Smith, and more – all available online. While the list shown on this page is fairly straightforward, you might want to visit the university’s special collections page for more collections such as the C.S.S. Alabama collection. Not all information on this latter page is available online, however.
Alaska
Alaska’s Digital Archives: If you’re interested in Alaska history and culture, this site now includes over 10,000 items including images and text gathered from Alaska state museums, the Sitka Tribe Historical Society, the University of Alaska and more.
Alaska State Library: This link will take you to the online historical collections that focus on the Gold Rush as part of the Alaska Gold Rush centennial in 1999 by the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums, Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.
Statewide Library Electronic Doorway: Developed by the Alaska State Library and the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at The University of Alaska Fairbanks, SLED allows you to access digital formats of magazines and journals as well as photos and documents from all over the state.
Arizona
Arizona Archives Online: This site contains archival materials and collections from The Heard Museum Library and Archives, Arizona State Museum, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University.
Arizona Memory Project: The AMP is an online effort to provide access to the wealth of primary sources in Arizona libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions. The collections include many digital images from state archives.
Arizona Sonora Desert Museum Digital Library: This link will take users to catalogues of digital images, narratives and more of the plants, animals, minerals and biotic communities of the Sonoran desert region.
Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records: View photographs through the “History and Archives” link, or view information about Arizona history through the Collections and Programs link.
Cline Library: This library is sponsored by Northern Arizona University, and it contains archival and published material that documents the history and development of the Colorado Plateau in a variety of disciplines.
University of Arizona: This site is ‘obsolete,’ but the resources listed here are still active. If you follow the link on this page to the library site, the only place to discover digital collections is in the special collections section. In all cases, you may miss the Little Cowpuncher, a rural school newspaper of Southern Arizona that is reproduced in its entirety along with other special references to online materials.
Arkansas
Arkansas History Commission Archives: This amazing little site contains many digitalized newspaper stories, not just at the state and local level, but also religious, professional and special interest publications. Photocopies of articles can be purchased by filling out a request form.
Arkansas State Library: The Arkansas State Library Digital Collections contains the following collections: Digital State Publications, Proclamations and Executive Orders and Legislative Audit Reports Digital Publications.
University of Arkansas Libraries Digital Collection: This collection is limited, with the major topics being the history of the Arkansas Razorbacks and archives for the Lee Wilson & Co., an important contributor to the development of agriculture, industry, and education in the Arkansas Delta.
California
California Digital Library: CDL provides access to scholarly materials, databases of journal article abstracts and citations, electronic journals, publishing tools, and reference databases for the University of California community. Public access is allowed to many of the resources listed at this link, including the OAC (Online Archive of California), Counting California – a “one-stop shop” for government data and statistics about California – and more.
Oviatt Library Digital Collections: This is a multimedia database filled with of historically significant documents, manuscripts, photographs and related graphic materials for several collections including the history of the San Fernando Valley. This collection is sponsored by California State University.
The California Underground Railroad: Browse by newspaper article, articles, reports and more at this site that focuses on an important but too little known struggle in the quest for freedom and equality.
USC Archival Research Center: Collections are located in various repositories throughout the University of Southern California, but they are increasingly being brought together digitally and administratively under the auspices of ARC. The research center has provided this Web site that will serve as a central access point to hundreds of archives owned and housed at other libraries, museums and institutions throughout the region. The site also includes a comprehensive list of archival materials relating to Southern California that are housed at USC.
USC Digital Archive: University of South California Libraries select, collect, preserve and make accessible high quality digital images of unique materials with metadata to support research, and provide a “gateway” to resources on Los Angeles and Southern California.
Colorado
Colorado State University Digital Collections: You can search for specific documents or view resources such as the International Poster Collection, Colorado’s Waters Digital Archive, and more. Unfortunately, some resources are limited to the University of Colorado System and the Auraria Higher Education Campus and off-campus access may differ depending on whether you’re involved with an affiliated institution.
Colorado State Archives: Genealogists, social historians, and researchers will find databases, photographs, maps and more at this site, including D-Day radio broadcasts.
Colorado Virtual Library: A project of the Colorado State Library and Colorado libraries, this site serves as a content and services gateway for Colorado residents or for those interested in the state.
Western History and Genealogy: The Denver Public Library System offers over 120,000 images for viewing online. The works of many outstanding photographers are represented and features images of North American Indians, pioneer life, mining, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Denver, Colorado towns, railroads and more.
Connecticut
Connecticut History Online: CHO currently contains about 14,000 images of photographs, drawings and prints which may be searched or browsed in a variety of ways, including by keyword, subject, creator, title and date.
Connecticut State Library Digital Collections: Find aerial photos, Works Progress Administration (WPA) Census of Old Buildings, and more in images and text.
University of Connecticut Libraries Digital Gateway: Browse the digital collections to find numerous resources for historical, biological, and directory projects including invasive plants of New England, scanned maps of Connecticut from 1676-1930, and more.
Delaware
Digital Archives: This portion of Delaware’s official state site includes digitized images of many primary sources related to this state’s history. Some remarkable items include “Joseph Barker’s Negro Ledger Book, 1901-1811,” slavery papers, unusual autopsies, audio histories and more.
University of Delaware Library Digital Collections: This site provides free and open access to digital versions of selected materials held by the University of Delaware Library.
Florida
Central Florida Memory: If you want to learn about central Florida before theme parks and the space program, you’ll find what you need at this site. The archives include diaries and letters, maps, photographs and postcards, voters’ registration and funeral records.
Florida Digital Newspaper Library: Users can tap into this website to have access to more than 1,376,000 pages of all the news and history of Florida.
PALMM: Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the public universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials for research and scholarship. Currently this site links to twenty-nine online digital repositories that document various aspects of Floridian history, geography, and more.
The Florida Memory Project: Featuring over 137,000 digitized photographs from the State Archives of Florida, the Florida Photographic Collection is the most complete online portrait of Florida available.
USF Libraries Digital Collections: This repository holds photographs, gravestone collections, slave narratives and more, all gathered from a physical collection owned by the University of South Florida Libraries, primarily from the Tampa Library Special Collections Department.
Georgia
Digital Library of Georgia: Based at the University of Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia connects users to 500,000 digital objects in 90 collections from 60 institutions and 100 government agencies. This resource is part of GALILEO, a resource for Georgia citizens.
Georgia State University Digital Collections: Designed for the interests of scholarly communities as well as the general public, this site houses more than 21,000 items of digital collections. Visitors should be sure to check out the Planning Atlanta collection.
Georgia’s Virtual Vault: View colonial wills, confederate pension applications, Georgia Power Photograph Collection, and more. Historical context for many of the records found in the Virtual Vault may be found in the articles of the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
The Virtual Library: Sponsored by Emory University, this list of resources includes the Lewis H. Beck Center among many other online collections and initiatives.
Hawaii
Hawaii Digital Library: This is a collection of publications that have been printed in Hawaii by Hagadone Printing Company, including business magazines, visitor guides, brochures on Hawaii activities, restaurants, entertainment, and much more.
Hawai’i Digital Library: There are two digital libraries on Ulukau. Ulukau itself was the first established, and it contains many materials that were written in Hawaiian, with the translation included if one is available. The second of the digital libraries is the Hawai’i Digital Library (HDL). It contains materials about Hawai’i that were written in English.
Hawaii State Archives Digital Collections: This link will take visitors to a collection which includes indexes, records, and maps.
Asia-Pacific Digital Library: Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu sponsors this site, and it offers various collections on local weather, history, and tradition.
University of Hawai’i Digital Library: These digital collections at Manoa Library include historical and cultural material in digital form. Materials include scanned material from Archives and Manuscript collections, the Asia Collection, art works from the Jean Charlot Collection, resources related to Hawai’i and Pacific culture and history and material from the Rare collection.
Idaho
Digital Atlas of Idaho: From Idaho’s archaeology to its hydrology, this site covers it all in detail with maps, charts, and text.
University of Idaho Special Collections & Archives: Primary source materials in the Department of Special Collections in the University of Idaho Library include personal and organizational records and university archives, rare books, manuscripts, and historical photographs; these and other materials support research into nearly all facets of the history of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest.
Illinois
Chicago Public Library Digital Collections: Explore Chicago’s sewer system or learn more about the flowering of Afro-American culture at the beginning of the twentieth century in this city. This collection has information on these topics and more.
Illinois Digital Archive: The Illinois State Library provides access to the images in these collections for educational and research purposes only. You’ll discover a broad range of primary sources for everything from Abraham Lincoln to the The McLean County Museum of History’s Native American collection.
Illinois Historical Digitization Projects: Northern Illinois University Libraries’ digitization projects introduce various topics to the general public. Be aware that their “primary sources” often contain transcribed documents, which are – in reality – secondary sources.
Northern Illinois University Digital and Special Collections: This link allows visitors to see a collection of digital projects that principally shed light on American history and culture.
Indiana
Digital Media Repository: This digital repository brings all of Ball State University Libraries’ collections and activities into a single, cohesive, and accessible Web-based environment that also provides access to external digital resources.
Indiana Memory: This digital library is a collaboration of the state’s libraries, museums, archives, and related cultural organizations. Indiana Memory seeks to support and enhance education and scholarship for all Hoosiers.
Indiana State Digital Archives: Visitors to this site can search for their ancestors through indexes of state records that have taken more than 15 years to create.
Indiana University Digital Library Program: This is a collaborative effort among Indiana libraries to preserve these valuable resources and provide users with documents and images that pertain to the historical and cultural heritage of Indiana.
Iowa
Iowa Digital Library: The Iowa Digital Library contains more than 75,000 digital objects—photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents—from libraries and archives at University of Iowa and their partnering institutions. New collections are being added constantly.
Iowa Heritage Digital Collections: This site is an online repository of Iowa history and culture created by bringing together in digital form documents, images, maps, finding aids, interpretive and educational materials, and other media from collections held by a wide range of organizations throughout Iowa.
Iowa State University Digital Collections: This link highlights works and collections from Iowa State University’s library, including photos, manuscripts, artifacts, books, and audiovisual formats.
Kansas
Digital Collections and Projects: This is a project conducted by the University of Kansas (KU), and it includes ten digital projects that range from scholarly works from KU to historical documents and images that focus on Kansas history.
Kansas State Historical Society: Several projects to make images or transcripts of primary source documents available through the Internet are either completed or are underway at this site. For now, you can peruse items such as automobile and road pamphlets, railroad immigration pamphlets, and the Western Trails collection.
Territorial Kansas: Hundreds of personal letters, diaries, photos, and maps bring to life the settling of Kansas between 1854 and 1861.
Kentucky
Kentucky Digital Library: Visit these rare and unique digitized collections housed in Kentucky archives and offered online, including newspapers, maps, oral histories, images, and more.
Louisiana
LOUISiana Digital Library: The LOUISiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library of over 84,000 digital materials about Louisiana’s history, culture, places, and people. These historical treasures from Louisiana’s archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories in the state are made electronically accessible to the general public.
Louisiana State Archives: Anyone can utilize these archives, which include film and video materials produced in or about Louisiana and oral histories that document personal interviews about this state’s political and governmental history.
Tulane University Digital Library: This link takes scholars, students and the public to collections in areas such as jazz, Latin American studies, and New Orleans and Louisiana history and architecture.
Maine
Maine Memory Network: The Maine Memory Network provides access to over 12,000 historical items from over 180 museums, historical societies, libraries, and other organizations from every corner of Maine.
Maine State Archives: These archives include projects such as a collection of trademarks, Civil War “Yarns,” and more.
Windows on Maine: Windows on Maine is a pilot project to develop an online service offering streaming video programs and clips, and other primary and secondary digital resources, via broadband and wireless connections. This virtual library contains includes Native American resources, the Gulf of Maine science projects, and more.
University of Maine System Libraries: The gateway to digital collections found here provides the public access to thousands of selected, digitized materials. The materials are among the special collections made available by the UMS Libraries, in collaboration with other campus units, and in partnership with other cultural institutions in Maine.
Maryland
Archives of Maryland Online: This site currently provides access to over 471,000 historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland’s government.
Descriptions of Maryland: This site contains collections from Bernard C. Steiner (1867-1926), George Alfred Townsend (1841-1914), and Winston Churchill’s 1899 novel, Richard Carvel. All texts contain descriptions of Maryland from their writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage: The MDCH Program provides free online access to primary source material housed in a variety of Maryland’s cultural heritage institutions, including public, school, and academic libraries; historical societies; archives; museums; and other cultural heritage institutions.
Museum Online: Sponsored by the Maryland State Archives, this site contains a list of all online projects such as the original official Maryland charter language in English (actual document). The archives contain text, maps, image files and more.
Massachusetts
Digital Collections: Boston College Libraries offers this database to find relevant records and more to the general public.
Digital Commonwealth: The purpose of the Digital Commonwealth is to promote the creation of digital resources by libraries and other cultural organizations in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and to provide public access to these resources. This resource also contains links to smaller collections within the state that are sponsored by local and regional efforts by individual and collaborative libraries and museum projects.
Northeast Massachusetts Digital Library: The NMDL is a project to enhance access to an ever-growing digital collection of items located in or items related to northeast Massachusetts, defined by 54 towns within the service area of the Northeast Massachusetts Regional Library System (NMRLS).
Michigan
The Making of Modern Michigan: MMM is a collaborative project involving 52 Michigan libraries. It includes local history materials from communities around the state. Michigan’s unique heritage is represented through photographs, family papers, oral histories, genealogical materials, and much more.
Michigan Historical Museum: The projects on this site consist mainly of online museum exhibit tours; however, if you click on various maps to museum gallery locations, you’ll discover a deeper insight into Michigan history through topical pages that include text and images on various subjects in Michigan’s history.
Minnesota
Minnesota Digital Library: The MDLC coalition consists of library and museum professionals who work with cultural heritage organizations to digitize the state’s resources and collections. You’ll find more than 4,000 images in their “Minnesota Reflections” collection alone, including materials from the Hennepin County Medical Center History Museum, the Minnesota Streetcar Museum, and the Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Mississippi
Mississippi Digital Library: Funded by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Mississippi Digital Library Program is Mississippi’s first effort to develop a lasting cooperative digital library program for the state. The project focuses on primary sources associated with the civil rights era, since the partner repositories hold rich collections on that topic.
Missouri
Missouri Digital Heritage: Browse through this site to discover many online resources such as their online exhibits, a birth and death records database and more.
University of Missouri Digital Library: A repository of texts & images hosted by the University of Missouri System. You’ll find ver 20 text collections and 23 image collections, including collections from 15 libraries around the state of Missouri. Be sure to follow links on this page to visit other lists of collaborative digital collections.
Montana
Montana Historical Society: Go to “Outreach and Interpretation” to find visuals and text for teachers, “Historic Preservation” to discover information about research projects. The “Museum” tab contains information about current, online, and past exhibits, including links for more information about these projects.
Montana Memory Project: This link gives the general public free access to Montana’s culture and heritage through digital collections.
Montana State Library: Use the “Browse” feature in the left column to gain access to projects such as maps, an atlas, and Montana Memory. The latter project is a collection of digital collections and items relating to Montana’s cultural heritage. If you click the top tab, “For the Public,” you’ll find more historical resources in the left column, including archives, historical newspapers, and research databases.
Nebraska
Nebraska State Historical Society: This site contains online contents, information about state museums, and more. The online content contains link to outside sources as well as finding aids and transcribed materials.
Nebraska Western Trails: From pioneer wagon trails to modern recreational trails, this site covers them all through books, documents, maps, postcards, original paintings, and photographs. These artifacts were collected into a searchable database from the holdings of museums and libraries across Nebraska.
Nevada
Nevada State Library and Archives: Discover Nevada’s history through archival documents, mostly transcribed, and images. The Department of Cultural Affairs within this site maintains a page that carries information about a variety of Nebraska history topics.
University Digital Conservancy: As of October 2007, The University of Nevada at Reno (UNR) maintains 21 collections in their digital conservancy, 17 of which are public. Most of these projects contain text and image collections pertaining to Nevada history.
New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire Digital Collections: These digital collections include categories such as the Civil War, local history and genealogy, music and dance, and science and technology.
University of New Hampshire Internet Archive: Browse these collections by history, music and dance, maps, literature and poetry, and images. Materials for inclusion in the Digital Collections Initiative are drawn from all state library collections, especially government documents and special collections.
New Jersey
New Jersey State Archives: The state’s official research center for public record of enduring historical value, New Jersey Department of State’s Archive is a treasure trove for genealogists and historians.
New Mexico
DSpaceUNM: This site is a digital archive for The University of New Mexico’s research and creative works. It’s an open access tool for collecting, disseminating, and preserving the intellectual output of the UNM community.
New Mexico’s Digital Collections: University Libraries hosts Digital Collections from the University of New Mexico and from other New Mexico cultural heritage institutions. These collections contain documents, photographs, maps, posters, art and music, and topics include New Mexico history, water and land issues and Latin American art and politics.
New Mexico Digital History Project: This site was constructed with the backing of the Office of the State Historian to foster and facilitate an appreciation and understanding of New Mexico history and culture through education, research, preservation, and community outreach. View by HTML or by Flash.
Online Archive of New Mexico: OANM collections can also be browsed Rocky Mountain Online Archive (RMOA – see #), OANM maintains previous records at this site. The new OANM site collections can be browsed through the RMOA site, which is also located in this state.
New York
Digital Metro New York: A collaborative effort to support digitization projects involving significant collections held by METRO member libraries in New York City and Westchester County. Scroll down the page to find the list of collections, which range from Brooklyn Democratic Party and WWII scrapbooks to fashion design history databases and more.
Hamilton College Digital Collections: This site provides access to thousands of pages of unique and rare materials held by the Hamilton College Library. Choose from the Civil War collection, the Shaker collection, or the illustrations gallery, which displays a selection of images and illustrations found on documents in the previous two collections.
Hudson River Valley Heritage: This site contains collections from New York’s state libraries, colleges, historical societies and more. You’ll discover images, texts, maps and other documents that chronicle New York’s Hudson River Valley’s history.
New York Public Library Digital Projects: This site houses a large number of various digital collections, everything from the African American Migration Experience to The Life of Charles Dickens.
New York State Documents: For many recent State documents, the catalog record contains a link to an electronic version of the document. Many of these online publications are scanned documents, which were created by the library and made available online as PDF (portable document format) files.
State University History Archives: The Department of History at the University at Albany is one of the pioneers in wedding historical scholarship and teaching with digital technologies. Current projects are listed in the left column, with information about the collections shown on this page as you scroll down.
Syracuse University Digital Library: The Syracuse University Library Digital Collections site provides digital collections from Syracuse University Library (SUL), including the Special Collections Research Center and others that have participated in collaborative projects with SUL.
USMA Digital Collections: At the United States Military Academy Library’s Digital Collections you can gain access to Alexander Hamilton’s papers, to Civil War maps, to class yearbooks, and more from this West Point academy.
North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina Digital Library: Formerly known as the North Carolina History & Fiction Digital Library, the new Eastern North Carolina Digital Library contains 399 fiction and non-fiction volumes, 150+ museum artifacts, maps and educational material pertaining to the history of the 41 counties in Eastern North Carolina. This project brings together local history materials and historical fiction related to these localities, in addition to museum artifacts that highlight Eastern North Carolina’s rich past.
Echo: This collaborative effort to share North Carolina’s heritage is statewide, and contains materials that range from historical advertising to images and documents that pertain to both World Wars.
North Carolina’s Digital Heritage: Housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this center works with cultural heritage institutions across North Carolina to digitize and publish historic materials online.
North Carolina State Archives: This link will take you to the online projects, which include news and press releases, postal history, WWI documents and more.
North Dakota
Frontier Scout: The first newspaper known to have been published in northern Dakota Territory was the Frontier Scout issued at Fort Union on July 7, 1864, Robert Winegar & Ira F.Goodwin, publishers, Company I, 30th Regiment, Wisconsin Infantry, Proprietors. The North Dakota State Historical Society has scanned all known issues and made them available online.
Institute for Regional Studies and University Archives: The Institute for Regional Studies and the North Dakota State University (NDSU) Archives support the research needs of the undergraduate, graduate students, faculty and other scholars at North Dakota State University and beyond. You’ll discover historical exhibits, manuscript collections, and a huge photography collection among other resources.
Ohio
Akron-Summit County Public Library’s Digital Library: This digital offering includes found in the library’s history collection held by the Special Collections Division and an exhibit that showcases a selection of materials from the Frank E. Lawrence Collection housed at the Tallmadge Branch Library. The latter collection consists of historical materials about the community of Tallmadge, from its beginnings as an early town of the Connecticut Western Reserve to current information.
Cleveland Digital Library: This site holds a digital collection of texts, maps, and images, as well as access tools for digital and non-digital works, all concerning the history of greater Cleveland and the Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio. Supported and maintained by special collections in the Cleveland State University Library.
Cleveland Memory Project: This is a separate project from the one listed previously, and it showcases the special collections in the Cleveland State University Library.
Digital Shoebox Collections: Search for images and texts that relate to the history of southeastern Ohio.
Greater Cincinnati Memory Project: The Greater Cincinnati Memory Project is currently in the second phase of development, now building on an archive already filled with over 5,884 images that detail the Greater Cincinnati area’s past.
Ohio Historical Society: This site includes Ohio Memory, which is billed as the “online scrapbook of Ohio history.” The memory site alone carries over 26,000 primary sources collected from 300 archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums. Other resources that you can tap through this site include the Ohio Death Index and more.
OhioPix: These images are selections from the Ohio Historical Society’s collection. The site currently holds fifteen galleries on topics that range from street scenes to historical fashion to famous Ohioans.
State Library of Ohio Digital and Special Collections: This link takes users to a collection of numerous resources, including sources for genealogy and digital content, and ebooks.
Oklahoma
Electronic Publishing Center: Users will find a limited but useful collection at this Oklahoma State University (OSU) library site. They seek to expand this collection, which will remain faithful to collections focused on OSU or to the State of Oklahoma.
Sooner Stories: Sooner Stories has been discontinued, but the Oklahoma Department of Libraries has maintained this site’s resources. This site will direct you to the current edition entitled, Oklahoma Crossroads. This latter site consists of selected digital collections of the Oklahoma Department of Libraries spanning more than 100 years of rich, vibrant history, including documents, photographs, newspapers, reports, pamphlets, posters, maps, and an author database ranging in date from the late 1800s to present.
Oregon
Oregon Historic Photograph Collections: Photographs of Oregon, all digitized and searchable online, with special focus on the City of Salem and other Willamette Valley communities.
Oregon State Archives: This archive offers exhibits that include information about crafting the Oregon constitution, Oregon in the 1940s, and more.
Pennsylvania
Access Pennsylvania: This list brings collections from all over the state of Pennsylvania to public access, including State Library of Pennsylvania collections, Wissahickon Valley Public Library collections and more.
DEILA: The Dickinson Electronic Initiative in the Liberal Arts provides a “home” for existing and developing digital scholarly projects at Dickinson College. Projects include the annals of Dickinson College, the James Buchanan Resource Center, and the Patagonia Mosaic. The Three Mile Island project has been disabled as of this writing.
Historic Pittsburgh: This site contains a comprehensive collection of local resources that supports personal and scholarly research of the western Pennsylvania area. Browse collections categorized by images, text, maps, and more.
Pennsylvania Digital Library: This statewide repository houses resources created by Pennsylvania’s libraries, museums, schools, and other cultural heritage organizations.
Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission: The PHMC is the official history agency of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and through the Pennsylvania History portal, users can search people, places, events, and other things.
Pennsylvania State Archives: The Archives Records Information Access System (ARIAS) is designed to facilitate citizen access to archival records created by all branches and levels of Pennsylvania State Government. They carry digitized images of veteran information for several wars, a Pennsylvania National Guard Veteran’s Card File, and Militia Officers’ Index Cards for various years.
South Carolina
University Libraries Digital Collections: Users are able to search through photos and images, manuscripts, maps and more.
South Carolina Memory: This site brings together collections from various statewide institutions and provides both introductions and links to these various sites. This site is still under constructions, but they already have accumulated numerous resources in topics that range from “people” to “religion.”
South Dakota
Digital Library of South Dakota: This collaboration effort includes a wide variety of unique collections in audio, visual, and textual resources. Search everything from the South Dakota National Guard to the Civil War.
South Dakota Historical Society: The online exhibits include archives in the SDHS museum and materials from state archives.
Tennessee
Tennessee State Library and Archives: Users can search through numerous digital collections, including the photograph and image search and the Tennessee Virtual Archive, which include collections about the Tennessee School for the Deaf and the Civil War.
Volunteer Voices: Volunteer Voices is a statewide digitization program that provides online access to sources that document Tennessee’s rich history and culture. This program involves the collaborative efforts of Tennessee archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and schools.
Texas
East Texas Digital Archives and Collections: Maintained by the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University, this collection of digital archives includes photographs, documents, maps, and books, and other archival materials associated with the East Texas region.
Portal to Texas History: The Portal to Texas History offers students and lifelong learners a digital gateway to the rich collections held in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections. The site embraces all geographic areas of Texas and covers prehistory through the twentieth century, and includes digital reproductions of photographs, maps, letters, documents, books, artifacts, and more.
Texas Heritage Online: Texas Heritage Online provides unified online access to Texas’ historical documents and images for use by teachers, students, historians, genealogists, and other researchers. This project is still under development, with new materials being added constantly.
Texas State Library and Archives Commission: This site houses several hidden treasures. Two exhibits, Texas Treasures and The McArdle Notebooks are worth a look for anyone interested in this state’s history.
Utah
J. Willard Marriott Library: The University of Utah offers high-resolution digital facsimiles of selected collections that range from the arts to sports and recreation. You’ll also find more than 600,000 pages of digitized Utah historical newspapers at this site.
Utah Digital Newspapers: The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Library Services and Technology Act fund this archive, and it’s constantly being updated with new papers and with expanded time periods.
Utah State Archives Digital Collections: You can search through time capsule records for 2000-2001, news clippings from 1993-2003, and more at this site.
Vermont
Center for Digital Initiatives: Visitors to the University of Vermont Libraries Center for Digital Initiatives can browse through numerous unique digital collections.
Landscape Change Program: The Landscape Change Program at the University of Vermont is a virtual collection of hundreds of images that document 200 years of Vermont’s changing face. All images are online and free to the public.
Middlebury College Digital Collections: Browse or read about the digital collections at this Vermont college, which include a growing collection of digitized rare books and manuscripts, images, video and audio of lectures, and more than 200 historic images.
Vermont Historical Society: This link will take you to online exhibits that chronicle various topics in Vermont’s history.
Vermont in the Civil War: This independent Web site is a great resource, as it includes a transcription of George G. Benedict’s book, “Vermont in the Civil War” as well as genealogical resources.
Vermont State Archives: Gain access to historical photographs and databases at this official site.
Virginia
The Library of Virginia Digital Library: This library is slowing expanding its digital collections, and their land records and WPA artifacts represent superb resources for historians and genealogists. Don’t miss the exhibitions, which include topics about the coal mine, women in Virginia, and maps, images, and textual materials.
The Virginia Center for Digital History: The University of Virginia provides several online projects through this site, including Virtual Jamestown, the Dolly Madison Project, and The Valley of the Shadow.
VCU Online Exhibits: The online exhibits at this Virginia Commonwealth University site focus mainly on Virginia history and architecture.
Virginia Memory: Part of the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Memory regularly adds new digital collections. Be sure not to miss the featured collection, which also changes periodically.
Washington
King County Snapshots: This collaborative effort offers 12,000 historical images carefully chosen from thirteen organizations’ collections. These cataloged 19th and 20th century images portray people, places, and events in the county’s urban, suburban, and rural communities that surround Seattle.
Washington State Digital Archives: The home page offers a search box, but the collections link will reveal the projects undertaken by this state’s digitization program. You can search through materials such as birth records, photographs, physicians’ records and more, and many of these records contain individual images which can be viewed on this website.
Washington State Digital Collections: This is another collaborative collection that gathers archival materials from statewide public libraries, university holdings, and museums that chronicle this state’s history.
West Virginia
West Virginia History Online: The digital collections in this archive are primary sources that have been digitized and organized by collection and database. The photographs contains the most comprehensive collection of historic images pertaining to West Virginia in existence, and the Child Ballads of West Virginia are performed on audio files by Patrick Ward Gainer (1904-1981). This latter collection is a selection of British folksongs cataloged in Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads as discovered in Appalachia.
West Virginia Memory Project: This collection includes searchable databases, photographs, and documents. Some of the topics don’t contain explanatory notes, so searching the databases might prove frustrating unless you know exactly what you need. This project is part of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History site, where you can find more online materials.
Wisconsin
The State of Wisconsin Collection: The State of Wisconsin Collection brings together, in digital form, two categories of primary and secondary materials: writings about the State of Wisconsin and unique or valuable materials that relate to its history and ongoing development. Books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, maps and other resources deemed important to the study and teaching of the State of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin Electronic Reader: This site offers transcribed stories, essays, letters and poems that are illustrated and that focus on Wisconsin history from 1835 to 1949.
Wisconsin Heritage Online: WHO is an expanding digital collection, featuring documentary sources and material culture from Wisconsin libraries, archives, and museums.
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Resources within the UWDCC collections are free and publicly accessible online. They are loosely organized into collections that span a range of subjects including art, ecology, literature, history, music, natural resources, science, social sciences, the State of Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin. Digital resources include text-based materials such as books, journal series, and manuscript collections; photographic images; slides; maps; prints; posters; audio; and video.
Wisconsin Historical Society: The online exhibits at this site include items as “Pottery by Frackelton,” “Advertising posters from the McCormick- International Harvester Collection,” and more. This information-rich site also contains genealogical materials, information about historic buildings, and historical images.
Wyoming
University of Wyoming Digital Initiative: This Web site showcases the online multimedia collections built by the University of Wyoming’s digital initiative. Browse through general collections and wildlife, geography, and living sections.
Wyoming State Archives: Wyoming research had been made easy through this site, as it offers online collections of historical documents, historical trails, and genealogical materials. Some collections are merely described or inventoried and not offered online.
Multi-State Resources
The following resources are projects that range from the efforts between two states to larger collections that focus on the development of the entire U.S.
American Centuries: This site features a digital collection of approximately 2000 objects and transcribed document pages from Memorial Hall Museum and Library. The focus is a view from New England on the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
American Journeys: This site contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.
Boston Library Consortium: The list found through this link contains universities and institutions located in the New England area, and each link leads to digitization projects that are currently underway. Some of those projects are listed in this article, but you’ll find many more sites at this resource.
Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive: CRBEHA is a project of Washington State University Vancouver, the Idaho State Historical Society, Oregon Historical Society, Washington State Historical Society, and Washington State University Pullman. This site brings together selected highlights of the ethnic collections from leading repositories in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
Combined Arms Research Library: These electronic collections are largely composed of digital versions of paper documents from the Combined Arms Research Library collections (CARL). The researcher can discover texts that reach from obsolete military manuals to WWII operational documents.
Digital Archive of American Architecture: This archive is maintained by the Fine Arts Department at Boston College, and examples and accompanying text range from the seventeenth century to current urban projects.
Digital Library of Appalachia: The DLA provides online access to archival and historical materials related to the culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The contents of the DLA are drawn from special collections of Appalachian College Association member libraries located in states such as Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky.
Documenting the American South: DocSouth is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supports this site. Although some collections focus entirely on North Carolina, other resources, such as “Southern Homefront: 1861-1865” provide materials from across the south.
Early Americas Digital Archive: EADA is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.
Fish and Wildlife Digital Library System: Use the search engine or browse list of hyperlinked keywords to find recent images of Alaska, the northeast U.S. and in other regional categories, and historic images as well. Most, if not all, the images are 5″ x 7″, suitable for printing, and free for public use.
Library of Congress: Although this site is widely known for its popular American Memory project, there’s more to this site and it’s worth the time to explore their digital collections. Their “Chronicling America”project, for example, allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Making of America: This link will take you to Cornell University’s collection, which contains almost 1,000 volumes of 22 journals from the 19th century. This is a collaborative effort with the University of Michigan.
Matrix: With the support of MSU faculty, the College of Arts and Letters, and the H-Net Council, a Center was established to host all of H-Net’s computing and administrative facilities at Michigan State and to pursue a broad research program in humanities computing. Currently, the project extends beyond this collaboration to bring audio, video, text, and image files to the general public on subjects such as the African e-Journals Project, American Voices, and more.
Mountain West Digital Library: This site contains an aggregation of digital collections from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, and historical societies in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. The Mountain West defines the region of contributors, but the content extends far beyond the Mountain West and into different fields.
National Archives: This link will take you to this site’s online exhibits, but you can find more resources throughout this site that lean toward genealogical and social history research.
National Park Service: This government organization provides a growing collection of thousands of images, documents, drawings and maps about the cultural and natural resources maintained by the National Park Service across the U.S. and its territories.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery: The digitization process is ongoing at this site, but they invite you to peruse the newspaper issues that they have put on line including the Civil War and the Turn of the Century 1900-1907. They also include a section on antique books that they are in process of digitizing.
Oyez: This project provides access to more than 2000 hours of Supreme Court audio. All audio in the Court recorded since 1995 is included here. Before 1995, the audio collection is selective.
Rocky Mountain Online Archive: RMOA is serving as a repository for archival collections in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.
Northwest Digital Archives: The Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) provides enhanced access to archival and manuscript collections in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. These materials include correspondence, diaries, or photographs, and digital reproductions of primary sources are available in some cases.
United States Digital Map Archive: The United States Digital Map Library is a USGenWeb Archives project, developed in April of 1999. This project and its all-volunteer staff are dedicated to free, online access for the general public. The maps usually are large, and they offer images for every state and often for many counties within these states.
Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Archive: This collection features a digital image archive that showcases the Mississippi River region along the Illinois/Iowa border. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs were gathered from the collections of Davenport Public Library, Augustana College, and Musser Public Library in Muscatine.
USC Digital Library: The University of South Carolina provides resources for the general public, including broadsides from the Colonial Era to the present, the travel journal and album of collected papers of William Tennent III, 1740 – 1777, and more.
Valley of the Shadow: This is a project produced by the University of Virginia, and it details life in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania during the Civil War.
Western Waters Digital Library: WWDL contains government reports, classic water literature, legal transcripts, water project records, personal papers, photographic collections, and video materials about the Columbia, Colorado, Platte, and Rio Grande river basins. This site is a collaborative regional project created by twelve university libraries in eight western states.
WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections: Washington State University offers textual, image, and photographic collections online and to the general public. Some materials are merely described rather than offered online, such the audio collections (although you can find abstracts on some of these materials).
Larger Collections
These selections are gathered mainly from U.S. university resources, but other projects – including government and overseas efforts – are included.
Maps
Alexandria Digital Library: ADL is a distributed digital library with collections of georeferenced materials such as maps, aerial photographs and remote sensing (satellite) data. The site is supported by University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Ryhiner Map Collection: This collection consists of more than 16,000 maps, charts, plans and views from the 16th to the 18th century, covering the whole globe. Together with the 20,000 manuscript maps of the State Archives, the Canton of Berne owns not only a local, but a worldwide geographical memory.
Medical
National Library of Medicine: NLM, which is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world’s largest medical library. The Library collects materials and provides information and research services in all areas of biomedicine and health care.
Sciences
American Museum of Natural History: The digital library project on this site was launched in 1999 to develop an integrated database of library resources and natural history collections. The first major project of the Digital Library focuses on the Museum’s Congo Expedition, 1909-1915.
Ethnomathematics Digital Library: The Ethnomathematics Digital Library (EDL) is a resource network and interactive learning community for ethnomathematics, with emphasis on the indigenous mathematics of the Pacific region. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is extensively involved in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education (SMETE), and has funded the EDL as a collections project of the National SMETE Digital Library (NSDL).
Ewell Sale Stewart Library: Digital collections from this library focus on natural sciences, including “Fairy Tale World of Henry McCook: Illustrations of Anthropomorphic Arthropods in the 19th Century,” which will be added on an ongoing basis. This site is part of the Academy of Natural Sciences, located in Philadelphia.
Exploratorium Digital Library: The different collections in this K-12 library include digital media and digitized museum materials related to interactive exhibits and scientific phenomena, including images, educational activities in PDF and html formats, QuickTime movies, streaming media, and audio files.
National Science Digital Library: NSDL is the Nation’s online library for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Access to most of the resources discovered through NSDL is free; however, some content providers may require a login, or a nominal fee or subscription to retrieve their specific resources.
National Sea Grant Library: NSGL is the official NOAA Sea Grant archive and home to a comprehensive collection of Sea Grant–funded documents from over 30 programs and projects across the U.S. Topics include oceanography, marine education, aquaculture, fisheries, aquatic nuisance species, coastal hazards, seafood safety, limnology, coastal zone management, marine recreation, and law.
Other
Arts and Humanities Data Service: AHDS is a UK national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities. Currently, they cover five subject areas: archaeology, history, visual arts, performing arts, and literature, languages and linguistics.
Berkeley SunSITE: The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide. If this doesn’t satisfy you, visit the list of Berkeley’s libraries to search for more digital collections such as the Bancroft Library – this site holds public access documents for topics such as JARDA (Japanese-American Relocation Digital Archives) and links to OAC-specific projects.
CARLI Digital Collections: This collection includes various images and texts from repositories such as the Newberry Library, Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Saint Francis, and more.
Center for Digital Initiatives: Brown University’s digital collections are derived from their signature collections, including African-American sheet music from 1820-1920 (includes complete sheets with music), Lincoln broadsides, Napoleonic satirical prints produced between 1792 and 1829, and more. The materials are all open access.
CHNM: George Mason’s Center for History and New Media contains an amazing amount of images and text that cover a broad range of topics. Visit the “projects” section to view the online materials.
Claremont Colleges Digital Library: Collections of images, video and text that range from fine arts to social sciences.
Columbia University Digital Collections: From information about the “Advanced Papyrological Information System” to notable New Yorkers, this site from Columbia University Libraries is free and open to the public.
Cornell University Library: Visit digital collections, exhibits, and partnership projects from this link. You can also gain access to more information through this university’s Windows on the Past site. Only one collection, the International Women’s Periodicals, is Cornell University access only.
Digital Activities and Collections: The University of Chicago Library creates a variety of online finding aids and retrospectively digitized collections and also supports related initiatives on campus by providing systems administration and programming support to faculty-driven projects and collections. Some resources point to other sources such as the Library of Congress.
Digital Library: The University of Colorado Digital Library is a collaborative project between the University of Colorado System and institutions of the Auraria Higher Education Campus. Collections include images, audio, and video files. Many of these resources are available to the general public, although some may carry copyright restrictions.
Digital Library Collections: Northwestern University Library, Illinois, provides various tools for the online researcher, including audio speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and more.
Digital Library of Information Science and Technology: dLIST is an open access archive for the Information Sciences, and is supported by the School of Information Resources and Library Science and Learning Technologies Center, University of Arizona.
George Mason Digitized Collections: Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) creates and maintains representative digital collections for an increasing amount of its holdings. You’ll discover information gathered from Virginia Civil War archive, 1893 Southwest photographs and more at this site.
GPB Digital Library: This site, supported by Georgia Public Broadcasting, offers an archive of many programs including their “Cover to Cover” series on books and other topics on sports, arts, and more.
Harold B. Lee Library: The digital collections on the Brigham Young University site include art collections, dissertations, text, and multimedia. You can also conduct searches at the Scholarly Periodicals Center.
IATH: The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University of Virginia. The research projects, essays, and documentation presented here are the products of a unique collaboration between humanities and computer science research faculty, computer professionals, student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff.
Indiana University Digital Library Program: DLP is dedicated to the production, maintenance, delivery, and preservation of a wide range of high-quality networked information resources for scholars and students at Indiana University and elsewhere. Some collections are contained within the site, and others link to other online libraries and repositories.
Internet Archive: IA, founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this site is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library. IA is mirrored at Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt to ensure the stability and endurance of the archives.
Internet Public Library: The Internet Public Library is hosted by The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, with major support from the College of Information at Florida State University and its founder, the University of Michigan School of Information. This collection provides a learning/teaching environment with subject collections, special collections, and other tools that you would find in any bricks and mortar library.
Michigan State University Libraries: The Digital & Multimedia Center of the Michigan State University Libraries serves both the MSU community and the worldwide academic community through digitization projects that preserve scholarly resources and make them more widely available. Categories in the digital collections range from Africana to veterinary medicine.
NYPL Digital: The New York Public Library Digital is your gateway to The Library’s rare and unique collections in digitized form. Find over 550,000 images from primary sources and printed rarities including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, illustrated books, and “printed ephemera.”
Office of Digital Collections and Research: The Office of Digital Collections and Research (DCR) of the University of Maryland Libraries provide extensive projects for online research.
Open Collections Program: Sponsored by Harvard University, this site offers information about projects such as ‘Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930,’ and ‘Women Working, 1800-1930.’ This site also provides a link to Harvard’s selection of Web-accessible collections.
Research in Computing for Humanities: RCH was founded at the University of Kentucky in 2001, and they work closely with the Special Collections and Digital Programs Division of the University of Kentucky Libraries and the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments and UK’s Center for Computational Sciences to develop their projects. The site isn’t easy to navigate, as projects are listed on various pages throughout this site. But you’ll discover their Electronic Beowulf and other projects under construction at the bottom of the page.
SCC – Digital Projects: The SCC (Scholarly Communications Center) promotes the communication of scholarly material by developing digital projects across a broad range of academic topics, in collaboration with librarians, teaching and research faculty, and the State of New Jersey. Hosted by Rutgers University Libraries, this list contains topics ranging from an alcohol history database to WILD (Women In Leadership Database), a portal to unique scholarly resources about women’s leadership found in selective archival and manuscript collections at Rutgers University. You may also find additional projects at the library’s Project Page.
Smithsonian Digital Library: From annual reports to trade literature, the Smithsonian offers readers, students, and teachers the materials they might need to supplement specific projects.
The European Library: This digital collection offers access to the resources of the 47 national libraries of Europe. The resources include books, magazines, journals, audio recordings and other materials.
Tufts Digital Library: TDL provides a general means of interacting with digital content created at Tufts University or created for use in teaching and research by Tufts faculty, staff and students. However, most of the projects – such as the oral interviews that have audio files and transcriptions of the files – are open access.
UBdigit: The University of Buffalo (NY) includes primarily collections of still images, but anticipates future inclusion of a variety of digital media formats, including audio, video, kinetic images, animation, virtual reality, interactive sequences and multi-media constructs. At present, they carry projects that range from American literature to psychology.
UFDC Digital Collections: The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) is a research tool that enables a user to find unique and rare digitized materials held at the University of Florida (UF) and partner institutions. The repository holds a wide assortment of materials from arts, humanities, and social sciences to world projects such as the Africana Collection. Some resources are limited to university use only.
UCLA Library Digital Collections: This library offers broad public access to their digital collections, which include images, project papers, and photographs.
University of Minnesota Digital Collections Unit: The Visual History Archive alone contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies, and this is just one project among many available at this digital library. Search images to find items in topics that range from African-American Literature Cover Art to World War I & II Posters.
University of Oregon Libraries Digital Collections: This collection includes art images, a historical photography collection, a print collection and more. A number of collections are in the planning or development stages, including a “Medieval Manuscripts” collection and aerial photographs.
University of Tennessee Digital Collections: This site carries several projects that range from historical photograph collections to current collections gathered by this university’s Herbarium. Other projects include early images of Egypt and electronic theses and dissertations.
University of Washington Digital Collections: This site features materials from the University of Washington Libraries, University of Washington Faculty and Departments, and organizations that have participated in partner projects with the UW. The huge amount of material offered ranges from art and architecture to international and ethnic collections.
WRLC Libraries Digital and Special Collections: The Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) provides staff and systems to manage digitizing projects, scan materials, and enter descriptive information developed in conjunction with library staff. Their members include institutions such as the Catholic University of America, American University, George Mason University and more.
Yale Digital Collections: A short list of the resources available online from Yale University Libraries is available here. Access to some collections is restricted to on-campus use only.
eTexts and eBooks
The following resources hold texts and digitized images of documents with very few other resources such as photographs, audio, etc.
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts: “The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 “classic” public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.”
American Verse Project: This project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry is being converted into digital form.
Bartleby: Brought to readers from Columbia University, this site reproduces classic literature in hypertext and maintains a strong emphasis on the quality and integrity of the text.
BiblioVault: University of Chicago Press, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, developed this resource that serves more than 50 university presses and contains digital files for more than 12,500 books.
Carrie: Lynn H. Nelson, creator of CARRIE, is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kansas. The site is now part of the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. It contains archival materials from WWI, the López Martín Collection, and other documents.
CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of 935 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the other arts.
Digital Library of the Commons: DLC is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons. You’ll also find a new online photo collection from this link.
DRUM: The Digital Repository at the University of Maryland provides links to various faculty-contributed research and publications, UM theses and dissertations from December 2003 forward, and collections of technical reports. The site is slightly confusing, but when you search for a document, you need to scroll down the page to gain access to the file. These files are all open access.
Electronic Text Center: This digital collection, sponsored by the University of Virginia, is an on-line archive of standards-based texts and images in the humanities, The collection is offered in fifteen different languages.
ePage@Tech: This is Georgia Tech’s resource page for electronic texts, including theses and dissertations. Most of this collection is open access.
Google Book Search: This database continues to grow, with more than a hundred thousand titles added by publishers and authors and some 10,000 works in the public domain now indexed and included in search results. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format.
Humanities Text Initiative: The Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan’s Digital Library Production Service, has provided online access to full text resources since 1994. You’ll gain open access to text collections including the Making of America site, which holds over 12,639 volumes containing 3,792,847 pages of e-text. This is a collaborative effort with Cornell University.
Hypertexts: The University of Virginia comes through again with electronic texts that focus on American studies. The Yellow Pages on this site lists the online texts by topics that range from ethnicity to science and technology.
Internet Library of Early Journals: This is a joint project offered the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford (UK) that aims to digitize substantial runs of 18th and 19th century British journals. They make these images available on the Internet, along with associated bibliographic data.
Internet Sacred Text Archive: John B. Hare has an academic background in linguistics, anthropology and computer science, and he worked in the high technology field as a computer programmer and entrepreneur for twenty five years prior to starting this site, which is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics.
National Academies Press: Viewers can gain access to more than 3,700 books online free, and purchase from more than 1,900 PDFs listed on the site. When you click on a book, you may need to scroll down the page to find the full free text listed on the left.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: NDLTD is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations.
Online Books Page: the University of Pennsylvania lists over 25,000 free books on the Web. Some books are hosted at the site, other listings point to other Web sites that carry full text transcriptions or page images.
Oxford Text Archive: The Oxford Text Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic primary source materials. OTA holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora.
Penn Libraries: Scroll down to “Locally developed digital collections,” and you’ll discover open access projects such as SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, the Furness Collection Images (Shakespeare and English Renaissance), and more. Some projects are Penn access only.
Perseus: The Department of Classics at Tufts University, Boston, offers this digital library project that includes collections of humanities resources. If you experience difficulties with the site you can try to access the mirror sites in Berlin or in Chicago.
Project Gutenberg: Michael Hart founded this collection in 1971, and it’s now known as the oldest digital library. Most of the over 22,000 items in this collection consist of full texts of books in the public domain. Many independent organizations that share Project Gutenberg’s ideals have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark.
Royal National Institute for the Blind: The RNIB digital collection contains a talking book service, where users can gain access to 14,000 mostly unabridged titles in popular fiction, classic titles and non-fiction for people of all ages. The books can be ‘read’ on special DAISY(Digital Accessible Information System) players.
The Internet Classics Archive: Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and “reader’s choice” Web sites. You’ll discover mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation. The site is housed at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Tribal Writers Digital Library: The Sequoyah Research Center, located in Little Rock, Arkansas, supports the activities of the American Native Press Archives (ANPA). The ANPA digital text project brings out-of-print literary efforts of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and First Nations people of Canada to readers world wide. Viewers can copy these resources freely for personal use, research, and teaching (including distribution to classes) as long as a statement of reference is included.
UMDL Texts: UMDL Texts is the central access point for electronic books and journals provided by the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Browse through collections that focus on historical and current texts on dentistry, poetry, and more.
University of Georgia Digital Books: Download the DjVu plugin to view digitally enhanced works (deWorks), in addition to searchable book facsimiles, broadsides, posters, photographs, maps, manuscripts, transcripts, newspapers, and periodicals.
Wright American Fiction Project: This site is part of the LETRS project at Indiana University. The books, which were written from 1851 – 1875, include full texts online that are searchable by author, title, and phrases.
Directories
The links listed below will provide you with much more information on various research topics, and they’ll direct you to finding those resources online in most cases.
Digital Librarian: Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York, manages this list of categorized Web sites that’s very similar to the Yahoo! Directory.
Digital Library Federation Collections Registry: You’ll find a web-searchable database of nearly 300 public domain online digital collections. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of libraries and related agencies that are pioneering in the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their collections and services.
Digital Library for International Research: The Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS) sponsor DLIR. They provide on-line public access catalog containing the records of all the holdings in all participating libraries. They also deliver important bibliographic and full-text primary and secondary source information from all CAORC member centers, covering both print collections and research collections in other media.
ibiblio: ibiblio.org is a “collection of collections,” including links to sites that contain software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration between the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Library Without Walls: Library Without Walls customers use the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s digital library technology to access a wealth of scientific and technical resources worldwide from the desktop, anytime, anywhere.
National Transportation Library: The National Transportation Library works to bring together transportation libraries, information centers and information resource professionals to improve access to transportation resources and develop transportation knowledge networks. Your searches will take you to Web sites that focus on trains, automobiles, etc.
OAIster: OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. They provide access to these digital resources by “harvesting” their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), so you can use phrase to find documents rather than remember titles and authors.
The British Columbia Digital Library: This is a comprehensive guide to digital library collections, primarily text-based ones, and digital library construction technology in BC and around the world. Some databases are out of date, but you can still use these collections for direction.
June 17, 2020
I found this article at Clark Condensed blog that had great information. Check it out for this and more intormation.
There are so many records available on the Internet, in recorders offices, libraries, etc. So many of them can lead you to finding out information about your ancestors. So, I thought I’d share all the different kinds of records you can search through to find your ancestors, along with a few different resources to help you find them!
10 Places to Find Your Ancestors
Birth Records
Death Records
Marriage Records
Cemetary Records
Immigration Records
Military Records
Census Records
Obituaries
Wills
Land Deeds
Tax Records
Newspapers
Journals
Death Records
Marriage Records
Cemetary Records
Immigration Records
Military Records
Census Records
Obituaries
Wills
Land Deeds
Tax Records
Newspapers
Journals
December 17, 2017
Are you researching a topic or your family history. The information at this site will give you an amazing amount of options for your search. Below is the article outlining the list. Below the article is the list categorized by state. Check this out to help in your search.
Open Education Data Base
http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/ (2017)
"Hundreds of libraries and archives exist online, from university-supported sites to accredited online schools to individual efforts. Each one has something to offer to researchers, students, and teachers. This list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.
The sites listed here are mainly open access, which means that the digital formats are viewable and usable by the general public. So, such sites as the Connecticut Digital Library (iCONN) are not listed, as they operate on the premise that the user has a Connecticut library card in his or her possession.Efforts were made to go to the root source for these collections. In other words, if you’re seeking the American Memory Project, which was created and housed at the Library of Congress, then you’ll find the link for the Library of Congress rather than the link for American Memory (although we included that link in the description of the Library of Congress listing). The root sources, in most cases, will lead you to collections that are too numerous to list here. In fact, it would be impossible to list all sources and we know we may have missed some favorites.
As a warning, many states listed their collections as “archives” when, in reality, the sources contained secondary sources such as books and transcriptions rather than a digital image of the actual document. Still, these resources can be invaluable for the person who seeks sources on family histories or on regional histories. To that end, we offer links to localized collections first, categorized by state. "
Alabama
Alabama Department of Archives and History: ADAH preserves records and artifacts of historical value to promote a better understanding of Alabama history. Genealogists, researchers, teachers and students can find databases, newspaper clippings, and more at this site on a wide variety of topics pertaining to Alabama’s past.
Alabama Mosaic: AlabamaMosaic is a repository of digital materials on Alabama’s history, culture, places, and people. They pull various resources from Auburn University, the Birmingham Public Library and more to offer these images online.
Auburn University Digital Library: Based in the Ralph Brown Draughon Library, AUDL draws on a variety of collections archives and makes them available to educators and students in Alabama and beyond. Some resources, like images and old postcards, are available online. Gain access to other materials through interlibrary loan.
Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections: These resources are focused on the local history of Birmingham and the surrounding area.
University of Alabama Digital Collections: Gain access to this institution’s digital collections including yearbooks, the Civil War diary of George S. Smith, and more – all available online. While the list shown on this page is fairly straightforward, you might want to visit the university’s special collections page for more collections such as the C.S.S. Alabama collection. Not all information on this latter page is available online, however.
Alaska
Alaska’s Digital Archives: If you’re interested in Alaska history and culture, this site now includes over 10,000 items including images and text gathered from Alaska state museums, the Sitka Tribe Historical Society, the University of Alaska and more.
Alaska State Library: This link will take you to the online historical collections that focus on the Gold Rush as part of the Alaska Gold Rush centennial in 1999 by the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums, Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.
Statewide Library Electronic Doorway: Developed by the Alaska State Library and the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at The University of Alaska Fairbanks, SLED allows you to access digital formats of magazines and journals as well as photos and documents from all over the state.
Arizona
Arizona Archives Online: This site contains archival materials and collections from The Heard Museum Library and Archives, Arizona State Museum, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University.
Arizona Memory Project: The AMP is an online effort to provide access to the wealth of primary sources in Arizona libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions. The collections include many digital images from state archives.
Arizona Sonora Desert Museum Digital Library: This link will take users to catalogues of digital images, narratives and more of the plants, animals, minerals and biotic communities of the Sonoran desert region.
Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records: View photographs through the “History and Archives” link, or view information about Arizona history through the Collections and Programs link.
Cline Library: This library is sponsored by Northern Arizona University, and it contains archival and published material that documents the history and development of the Colorado Plateau in a variety of disciplines.
University of Arizona: This site is ‘obsolete,’ but the resources listed here are still active. If you follow the link on this page to the library site, the only place to discover digital collections is in the special collections section. In all cases, you may miss the Little Cowpuncher, a rural school newspaper of Southern Arizona that is reproduced in its entirety along with other special references to online materials.
Arkansas
Arkansas History Commission Archives: This amazing little site contains many digitalized newspaper stories, not just at the state and local level, but also religious, professional and special interest publications. Photocopies of articles can be purchased by filling out a request form.
Arkansas State Library: The Arkansas State Library Digital Collections contains the following collections: Digital State Publications, Proclamations and Executive Orders and Legislative Audit Reports Digital Publications.
University of Arkansas Libraries Digital Collection: This collection is limited, with the major topics being the history of the Arkansas Razorbacks and archives for the Lee Wilson & Co., an important contributor to the development of agriculture, industry, and education in the Arkansas Delta.
California
California Digital Library: CDL provides access to scholarly materials, databases of journal article abstracts and citations, electronic journals, publishing tools, and reference databases for the University of California community. Public access is allowed to many of the resources listed at this link, including the OAC (Online Archive of California), Counting California – a “one-stop shop” for government data and statistics about California – and more.
Oviatt Library Digital Collections: This is a multimedia database filled with of historically significant documents, manuscripts, photographs and related graphic materials for several collections including the history of the San Fernando Valley. This collection is sponsored by California State University.
The California Underground Railroad: Browse by newspaper article, articles, reports and more at this site that focuses on an important but too little known struggle in the quest for freedom and equality.
USC Archival Research Center: Collections are located in various repositories throughout the University of Southern California, but they are increasingly being brought together digitally and administratively under the auspices of ARC. The research center has provided this Web site that will serve as a central access point to hundreds of archives owned and housed at other libraries, museums and institutions throughout the region. The site also includes a comprehensive list of archival materials relating to Southern California that are housed at USC.
USC Digital Archive: University of South California Libraries select, collect, preserve and make accessible high quality digital images of unique materials with metadata to support research, and provide a “gateway” to resources on Los Angeles and Southern California.
Colorado
Colorado State University Digital Collections: You can search for specific documents or view resources such as the International Poster Collection, Colorado’s Waters Digital Archive, and more. Unfortunately, some resources are limited to the University of Colorado System and the Auraria Higher Education Campus and off-campus access may differ depending on whether you’re involved with an affiliated institution.
Colorado State Archives: Genealogists, social historians, and researchers will find databases, photographs, maps and more at this site, including D-Day radio broadcasts.
Colorado Virtual Library: A project of the Colorado State Library and Colorado libraries, this site serves as a content and services gateway for Colorado residents or for those interested in the state.
Western History and Genealogy: The Denver Public Library System offers over 120,000 images for viewing online. The works of many outstanding photographers are represented and features images of North American Indians, pioneer life, mining, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Denver, Colorado towns, railroads and more.
Connecticut
Connecticut History Online: CHO currently contains about 14,000 images of photographs, drawings and prints which may be searched or browsed in a variety of ways, including by keyword, subject, creator, title and date.
Connecticut State Library Digital Collections: Find aerial photos, Works Progress Administration (WPA) Census of Old Buildings, and more in images and text.
University of Connecticut Libraries Digital Gateway: Browse the digital collections to find numerous resources for historical, biological, and directory projects including invasive plants of New England, scanned maps of Connecticut from 1676-1930, and more.
Delaware
Digital Archives: This portion of Delaware’s official state site includes digitized images of many primary sources related to this state’s history. Some remarkable items include “Joseph Barker’s Negro Ledger Book, 1901-1811,” slavery papers, unusual autopsies, audio histories and more.
University of Delaware Library Digital Collections: This site provides free and open access to digital versions of selected materials held by the University of Delaware Library.
Florida
Central Florida Memory: If you want to learn about central Florida before theme parks and the space program, you’ll find what you need at this site. The archives include diaries and letters, maps, photographs and postcards, voters’ registration and funeral records.
Florida Digital Newspaper Library: Users can tap into this website to have access to more than 1,376,000 pages of all the news and history of Florida.
PALMM: Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the public universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials for research and scholarship. Currently this site links to twenty-nine online digital repositories that document various aspects of Floridian history, geography, and more.
The Florida Memory Project: Featuring over 137,000 digitized photographs from the State Archives of Florida, the Florida Photographic Collection is the most complete online portrait of Florida available.
USF Libraries Digital Collections: This repository holds photographs, gravestone collections, slave narratives and more, all gathered from a physical collection owned by the University of South Florida Libraries, primarily from the Tampa Library Special Collections Department.
Georgia
Digital Library of Georgia: Based at the University of Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia connects users to 500,000 digital objects in 90 collections from 60 institutions and 100 government agencies. This resource is part of GALILEO, a resource for Georgia citizens.
Georgia State University Digital Collections: Designed for the interests of scholarly communities as well as the general public, this site houses more than 21,000 items of digital collections. Visitors should be sure to check out the Planning Atlanta collection.
Georgia’s Virtual Vault: View colonial wills, confederate pension applications, Georgia Power Photograph Collection, and more. Historical context for many of the records found in the Virtual Vault may be found in the articles of the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
The Virtual Library: Sponsored by Emory University, this list of resources includes the Lewis H. Beck Center among many other online collections and initiatives.
Hawaii
Hawaii Digital Library: This is a collection of publications that have been printed in Hawaii by Hagadone Printing Company, including business magazines, visitor guides, brochures on Hawaii activities, restaurants, entertainment, and much more.
Hawai’i Digital Library: There are two digital libraries on Ulukau. Ulukau itself was the first established, and it contains many materials that were written in Hawaiian, with the translation included if one is available. The second of the digital libraries is the Hawai’i Digital Library (HDL). It contains materials about Hawai’i that were written in English.
Hawaii State Archives Digital Collections: This link will take visitors to a collection which includes indexes, records, and maps.
Asia-Pacific Digital Library: Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu sponsors this site, and it offers various collections on local weather, history, and tradition.
University of Hawai’i Digital Library: These digital collections at Manoa Library include historical and cultural material in digital form. Materials include scanned material from Archives and Manuscript collections, the Asia Collection, art works from the Jean Charlot Collection, resources related to Hawai’i and Pacific culture and history and material from the Rare collection.
Idaho
Digital Atlas of Idaho: From Idaho’s archaeology to its hydrology, this site covers it all in detail with maps, charts, and text.
University of Idaho Special Collections & Archives: Primary source materials in the Department of Special Collections in the University of Idaho Library include personal and organizational records and university archives, rare books, manuscripts, and historical photographs; these and other materials support research into nearly all facets of the history of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest.
Illinois
Chicago Public Library Digital Collections: Explore Chicago’s sewer system or learn more about the flowering of Afro-American culture at the beginning of the twentieth century in this city. This collection has information on these topics and more.
Illinois Digital Archive: The Illinois State Library provides access to the images in these collections for educational and research purposes only. You’ll discover a broad range of primary sources for everything from Abraham Lincoln to the The McLean County Museum of History’s Native American collection.
Illinois Historical Digitization Projects: Northern Illinois University Libraries’ digitization projects introduce various topics to the general public. Be aware that their “primary sources” often contain transcribed documents, which are – in reality – secondary sources.
Northern Illinois University Digital and Special Collections: This link allows visitors to see a collection of digital projects that principally shed light on American history and culture.
Indiana
Digital Media Repository: This digital repository brings all of Ball State University Libraries’ collections and activities into a single, cohesive, and accessible Web-based environment that also provides access to external digital resources.
Indiana Memory: This digital library is a collaboration of the state’s libraries, museums, archives, and related cultural organizations. Indiana Memory seeks to support and enhance education and scholarship for all Hoosiers.
Indiana State Digital Archives: Visitors to this site can search for their ancestors through indexes of state records that have taken more than 15 years to create.
Indiana University Digital Library Program: This is a collaborative effort among Indiana libraries to preserve these valuable resources and provide users with documents and images that pertain to the historical and cultural heritage of Indiana.
Iowa
Iowa Digital Library: The Iowa Digital Library contains more than 75,000 digital objects—photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents—from libraries and archives at University of Iowa and their partnering institutions. New collections are being added constantly.
Iowa Heritage Digital Collections: This site is an online repository of Iowa history and culture created by bringing together in digital form documents, images, maps, finding aids, interpretive and educational materials, and other media from collections held by a wide range of organizations throughout Iowa.
Iowa State University Digital Collections: This link highlights works and collections from Iowa State University’s library, including photos, manuscripts, artifacts, books, and audiovisual formats.
Kansas
Digital Collections and Projects: This is a project conducted by the University of Kansas (KU), and it includes ten digital projects that range from scholarly works from KU to historical documents and images that focus on Kansas history.
Kansas State Historical Society: Several projects to make images or transcripts of primary source documents available through the Internet are either completed or are underway at this site. For now, you can peruse items such as automobile and road pamphlets, railroad immigration pamphlets, and the Western Trails collection.
Territorial Kansas: Hundreds of personal letters, diaries, photos, and maps bring to life the settling of Kansas between 1854 and 1861.
Kentucky
Kentucky Digital Library: Visit these rare and unique digitized collections housed in Kentucky archives and offered online, including newspapers, maps, oral histories, images, and more.
Louisiana
LOUISiana Digital Library: The LOUISiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library of over 84,000 digital materials about Louisiana’s history, culture, places, and people. These historical treasures from Louisiana’s archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories in the state are made electronically accessible to the general public.
Louisiana State Archives: Anyone can utilize these archives, which include film and video materials produced in or about Louisiana and oral histories that document personal interviews about this state’s political and governmental history.
Tulane University Digital Library: This link takes scholars, students and the public to collections in areas such as jazz, Latin American studies, and New Orleans and Louisiana history and architecture.
Maine
Maine Memory Network: The Maine Memory Network provides access to over 12,000 historical items from over 180 museums, historical societies, libraries, and other organizations from every corner of Maine.
Maine State Archives: These archives include projects such as a collection of trademarks, Civil War “Yarns,” and more.
Windows on Maine: Windows on Maine is a pilot project to develop an online service offering streaming video programs and clips, and other primary and secondary digital resources, via broadband and wireless connections. This virtual library contains includes Native American resources, the Gulf of Maine science projects, and more.
University of Maine System Libraries: The gateway to digital collections found here provides the public access to thousands of selected, digitized materials. The materials are among the special collections made available by the UMS Libraries, in collaboration with other campus units, and in partnership with other cultural institutions in Maine.
Maryland
Archives of Maryland Online: This site currently provides access to over 471,000 historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative, judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland’s government.
Descriptions of Maryland: This site contains collections from Bernard C. Steiner (1867-1926), George Alfred Townsend (1841-1914), and Winston Churchill’s 1899 novel, Richard Carvel. All texts contain descriptions of Maryland from their writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage: The MDCH Program provides free online access to primary source material housed in a variety of Maryland’s cultural heritage institutions, including public, school, and academic libraries; historical societies; archives; museums; and other cultural heritage institutions.
Museum Online: Sponsored by the Maryland State Archives, this site contains a list of all online projects such as the original official Maryland charter language in English (actual document). The archives contain text, maps, image files and more.
Massachusetts
Digital Collections: Boston College Libraries offers this database to find relevant records and more to the general public.
Digital Commonwealth: The purpose of the Digital Commonwealth is to promote the creation of digital resources by libraries and other cultural organizations in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and to provide public access to these resources. This resource also contains links to smaller collections within the state that are sponsored by local and regional efforts by individual and collaborative libraries and museum projects.
Northeast Massachusetts Digital Library: The NMDL is a project to enhance access to an ever-growing digital collection of items located in or items related to northeast Massachusetts, defined by 54 towns within the service area of the Northeast Massachusetts Regional Library System (NMRLS).
Michigan
The Making of Modern Michigan: MMM is a collaborative project involving 52 Michigan libraries. It includes local history materials from communities around the state. Michigan’s unique heritage is represented through photographs, family papers, oral histories, genealogical materials, and much more.
Michigan Historical Museum: The projects on this site consist mainly of online museum exhibit tours; however, if you click on various maps to museum gallery locations, you’ll discover a deeper insight into Michigan history through topical pages that include text and images on various subjects in Michigan’s history.
Minnesota
Minnesota Digital Library: The MDLC coalition consists of library and museum professionals who work with cultural heritage organizations to digitize the state’s resources and collections. You’ll find more than 4,000 images in their “Minnesota Reflections” collection alone, including materials from the Hennepin County Medical Center History Museum, the Minnesota Streetcar Museum, and the Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Mississippi
Mississippi Digital Library: Funded by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Mississippi Digital Library Program is Mississippi’s first effort to develop a lasting cooperative digital library program for the state. The project focuses on primary sources associated with the civil rights era, since the partner repositories hold rich collections on that topic.
Missouri
Missouri Digital Heritage: Browse through this site to discover many online resources such as their online exhibits, a birth and death records database and more.
University of Missouri Digital Library: A repository of texts & images hosted by the University of Missouri System. You’ll find ver 20 text collections and 23 image collections, including collections from 15 libraries around the state of Missouri. Be sure to follow links on this page to visit other lists of collaborative digital collections.
Montana
Montana Historical Society: Go to “Outreach and Interpretation” to find visuals and text for teachers, “Historic Preservation” to discover information about research projects. The “Museum” tab contains information about current, online, and past exhibits, including links for more information about these projects.
Montana Memory Project: This link gives the general public free access to Montana’s culture and heritage through digital collections.
Montana State Library: Use the “Browse” feature in the left column to gain access to projects such as maps, an atlas, and Montana Memory. The latter project is a collection of digital collections and items relating to Montana’s cultural heritage. If you click the top tab, “For the Public,” you’ll find more historical resources in the left column, including archives, historical newspapers, and research databases.
Nebraska
Nebraska State Historical Society: This site contains online contents, information about state museums, and more. The online content contains link to outside sources as well as finding aids and transcribed materials.
Nebraska Western Trails: From pioneer wagon trails to modern recreational trails, this site covers them all through books, documents, maps, postcards, original paintings, and photographs. These artifacts were collected into a searchable database from the holdings of museums and libraries across Nebraska.
Nevada
Nevada State Library and Archives: Discover Nevada’s history through archival documents, mostly transcribed, and images. The Department of Cultural Affairs within this site maintains a page that carries information about a variety of Nebraska history topics.
University Digital Conservancy: As of October 2007, The University of Nevada at Reno (UNR) maintains 21 collections in their digital conservancy, 17 of which are public. Most of these projects contain text and image collections pertaining to Nevada history.
New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire Digital Collections: These digital collections include categories such as the Civil War, local history and genealogy, music and dance, and science and technology.
University of New Hampshire Internet Archive: Browse these collections by history, music and dance, maps, literature and poetry, and images. Materials for inclusion in the Digital Collections Initiative are drawn from all state library collections, especially government documents and special collections.
New Jersey
New Jersey State Archives: The state’s official research center for public record of enduring historical value, New Jersey Department of State’s Archive is a treasure trove for genealogists and historians.
New Mexico
DSpaceUNM: This site is a digital archive for The University of New Mexico’s research and creative works. It’s an open access tool for collecting, disseminating, and preserving the intellectual output of the UNM community.
New Mexico’s Digital Collections: University Libraries hosts Digital Collections from the University of New Mexico and from other New Mexico cultural heritage institutions. These collections contain documents, photographs, maps, posters, art and music, and topics include New Mexico history, water and land issues and Latin American art and politics.
New Mexico Digital History Project: This site was constructed with the backing of the Office of the State Historian to foster and facilitate an appreciation and understanding of New Mexico history and culture through education, research, preservation, and community outreach. View by HTML or by Flash.
Online Archive of New Mexico: OANM collections can also be browsed Rocky Mountain Online Archive (RMOA – see #), OANM maintains previous records at this site. The new OANM site collections can be browsed through the RMOA site, which is also located in this state.
New York
Digital Metro New York: A collaborative effort to support digitization projects involving significant collections held by METRO member libraries in New York City and Westchester County. Scroll down the page to find the list of collections, which range from Brooklyn Democratic Party and WWII scrapbooks to fashion design history databases and more.
Hamilton College Digital Collections: This site provides access to thousands of pages of unique and rare materials held by the Hamilton College Library. Choose from the Civil War collection, the Shaker collection, or the illustrations gallery, which displays a selection of images and illustrations found on documents in the previous two collections.
Hudson River Valley Heritage: This site contains collections from New York’s state libraries, colleges, historical societies and more. You’ll discover images, texts, maps and other documents that chronicle New York’s Hudson River Valley’s history.
New York Public Library Digital Projects: This site houses a large number of various digital collections, everything from the African American Migration Experience to The Life of Charles Dickens.
New York State Documents: For many recent State documents, the catalog record contains a link to an electronic version of the document. Many of these online publications are scanned documents, which were created by the library and made available online as PDF (portable document format) files.
State University History Archives: The Department of History at the University at Albany is one of the pioneers in wedding historical scholarship and teaching with digital technologies. Current projects are listed in the left column, with information about the collections shown on this page as you scroll down.
Syracuse University Digital Library: The Syracuse University Library Digital Collections site provides digital collections from Syracuse University Library (SUL), including the Special Collections Research Center and others that have participated in collaborative projects with SUL.
USMA Digital Collections: At the United States Military Academy Library’s Digital Collections you can gain access to Alexander Hamilton’s papers, to Civil War maps, to class yearbooks, and more from this West Point academy.
North Carolina
Eastern North Carolina Digital Library: Formerly known as the North Carolina History & Fiction Digital Library, the new Eastern North Carolina Digital Library contains 399 fiction and non-fiction volumes, 150+ museum artifacts, maps and educational material pertaining to the history of the 41 counties in Eastern North Carolina. This project brings together local history materials and historical fiction related to these localities, in addition to museum artifacts that highlight Eastern North Carolina’s rich past.
Echo: This collaborative effort to share North Carolina’s heritage is statewide, and contains materials that range from historical advertising to images and documents that pertain to both World Wars.
North Carolina’s Digital Heritage: Housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this center works with cultural heritage institutions across North Carolina to digitize and publish historic materials online.
North Carolina State Archives: This link will take you to the online projects, which include news and press releases, postal history, WWI documents and more.
North Dakota
Frontier Scout: The first newspaper known to have been published in northern Dakota Territory was the Frontier Scout issued at Fort Union on July 7, 1864, Robert Winegar & Ira F.Goodwin, publishers, Company I, 30th Regiment, Wisconsin Infantry, Proprietors. The North Dakota State Historical Society has scanned all known issues and made them available online.
Institute for Regional Studies and University Archives: The Institute for Regional Studies and the North Dakota State University (NDSU) Archives support the research needs of the undergraduate, graduate students, faculty and other scholars at North Dakota State University and beyond. You’ll discover historical exhibits, manuscript collections, and a huge photography collection among other resources.
Ohio
Akron-Summit County Public Library’s Digital Library: This digital offering includes found in the library’s history collection held by the Special Collections Division and an exhibit that showcases a selection of materials from the Frank E. Lawrence Collection housed at the Tallmadge Branch Library. The latter collection consists of historical materials about the community of Tallmadge, from its beginnings as an early town of the Connecticut Western Reserve to current information.
Cleveland Digital Library: This site holds a digital collection of texts, maps, and images, as well as access tools for digital and non-digital works, all concerning the history of greater Cleveland and the Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio. Supported and maintained by special collections in the Cleveland State University Library.
Cleveland Memory Project: This is a separate project from the one listed previously, and it showcases the special collections in the Cleveland State University Library.
Digital Shoebox Collections: Search for images and texts that relate to the history of southeastern Ohio.
Greater Cincinnati Memory Project: The Greater Cincinnati Memory Project is currently in the second phase of development, now building on an archive already filled with over 5,884 images that detail the Greater Cincinnati area’s past.
Ohio Historical Society: This site includes Ohio Memory, which is billed as the “online scrapbook of Ohio history.” The memory site alone carries over 26,000 primary sources collected from 300 archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums. Other resources that you can tap through this site include the Ohio Death Index and more.
OhioPix: These images are selections from the Ohio Historical Society’s collection. The site currently holds fifteen galleries on topics that range from street scenes to historical fashion to famous Ohioans.
State Library of Ohio Digital and Special Collections: This link takes users to a collection of numerous resources, including sources for genealogy and digital content, and ebooks.
Oklahoma
Electronic Publishing Center: Users will find a limited but useful collection at this Oklahoma State University (OSU) library site. They seek to expand this collection, which will remain faithful to collections focused on OSU or to the State of Oklahoma.
Sooner Stories: Sooner Stories has been discontinued, but the Oklahoma Department of Libraries has maintained this site’s resources. This site will direct you to the current edition entitled, Oklahoma Crossroads. This latter site consists of selected digital collections of the Oklahoma Department of Libraries spanning more than 100 years of rich, vibrant history, including documents, photographs, newspapers, reports, pamphlets, posters, maps, and an author database ranging in date from the late 1800s to present.
Oregon
Oregon Historic Photograph Collections: Photographs of Oregon, all digitized and searchable online, with special focus on the City of Salem and other Willamette Valley communities.
Oregon State Archives: This archive offers exhibits that include information about crafting the Oregon constitution, Oregon in the 1940s, and more.
Pennsylvania
Access Pennsylvania: This list brings collections from all over the state of Pennsylvania to public access, including State Library of Pennsylvania collections, Wissahickon Valley Public Library collections and more.
DEILA: The Dickinson Electronic Initiative in the Liberal Arts provides a “home” for existing and developing digital scholarly projects at Dickinson College. Projects include the annals of Dickinson College, the James Buchanan Resource Center, and the Patagonia Mosaic. The Three Mile Island project has been disabled as of this writing.
Historic Pittsburgh: This site contains a comprehensive collection of local resources that supports personal and scholarly research of the western Pennsylvania area. Browse collections categorized by images, text, maps, and more.
Pennsylvania Digital Library: This statewide repository houses resources created by Pennsylvania’s libraries, museums, schools, and other cultural heritage organizations.
Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission: The PHMC is the official history agency of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and through the Pennsylvania History portal, users can search people, places, events, and other things.
Pennsylvania State Archives: The Archives Records Information Access System (ARIAS) is designed to facilitate citizen access to archival records created by all branches and levels of Pennsylvania State Government. They carry digitized images of veteran information for several wars, a Pennsylvania National Guard Veteran’s Card File, and Militia Officers’ Index Cards for various years.
South Carolina
University Libraries Digital Collections: Users are able to search through photos and images, manuscripts, maps and more.
South Carolina Memory: This site brings together collections from various statewide institutions and provides both introductions and links to these various sites. This site is still under constructions, but they already have accumulated numerous resources in topics that range from “people” to “religion.”
South Dakota
Digital Library of South Dakota: This collaboration effort includes a wide variety of unique collections in audio, visual, and textual resources. Search everything from the South Dakota National Guard to the Civil War.
South Dakota Historical Society: The online exhibits include archives in the SDHS museum and materials from state archives.
Tennessee
Tennessee State Library and Archives: Users can search through numerous digital collections, including the photograph and image search and the Tennessee Virtual Archive, which include collections about the Tennessee School for the Deaf and the Civil War.
Volunteer Voices: Volunteer Voices is a statewide digitization program that provides online access to sources that document Tennessee’s rich history and culture. This program involves the collaborative efforts of Tennessee archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and schools.
Texas
East Texas Digital Archives and Collections: Maintained by the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University, this collection of digital archives includes photographs, documents, maps, and books, and other archival materials associated with the East Texas region.
Portal to Texas History: The Portal to Texas History offers students and lifelong learners a digital gateway to the rich collections held in Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections. The site embraces all geographic areas of Texas and covers prehistory through the twentieth century, and includes digital reproductions of photographs, maps, letters, documents, books, artifacts, and more.
Texas Heritage Online: Texas Heritage Online provides unified online access to Texas’ historical documents and images for use by teachers, students, historians, genealogists, and other researchers. This project is still under development, with new materials being added constantly.
Texas State Library and Archives Commission: This site houses several hidden treasures. Two exhibits, Texas Treasures and The McArdle Notebooks are worth a look for anyone interested in this state’s history.
Utah
J. Willard Marriott Library: The University of Utah offers high-resolution digital facsimiles of selected collections that range from the arts to sports and recreation. You’ll also find more than 600,000 pages of digitized Utah historical newspapers at this site.
Utah Digital Newspapers: The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Library Services and Technology Act fund this archive, and it’s constantly being updated with new papers and with expanded time periods.
Utah State Archives Digital Collections: You can search through time capsule records for 2000-2001, news clippings from 1993-2003, and more at this site.
Vermont
Center for Digital Initiatives: Visitors to the University of Vermont Libraries Center for Digital Initiatives can browse through numerous unique digital collections.
Landscape Change Program: The Landscape Change Program at the University of Vermont is a virtual collection of hundreds of images that document 200 years of Vermont’s changing face. All images are online and free to the public.
Middlebury College Digital Collections: Browse or read about the digital collections at this Vermont college, which include a growing collection of digitized rare books and manuscripts, images, video and audio of lectures, and more than 200 historic images.
Vermont Historical Society: This link will take you to online exhibits that chronicle various topics in Vermont’s history.
Vermont in the Civil War: This independent Web site is a great resource, as it includes a transcription of George G. Benedict’s book, “Vermont in the Civil War” as well as genealogical resources.
Vermont State Archives: Gain access to historical photographs and databases at this official site.
Virginia
The Library of Virginia Digital Library: This library is slowing expanding its digital collections, and their land records and WPA artifacts represent superb resources for historians and genealogists. Don’t miss the exhibitions, which include topics about the coal mine, women in Virginia, and maps, images, and textual materials.
The Virginia Center for Digital History: The University of Virginia provides several online projects through this site, including Virtual Jamestown, the Dolly Madison Project, and The Valley of the Shadow.
VCU Online Exhibits: The online exhibits at this Virginia Commonwealth University site focus mainly on Virginia history and architecture.
Virginia Memory: Part of the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Memory regularly adds new digital collections. Be sure not to miss the featured collection, which also changes periodically.
Washington
King County Snapshots: This collaborative effort offers 12,000 historical images carefully chosen from thirteen organizations’ collections. These cataloged 19th and 20th century images portray people, places, and events in the county’s urban, suburban, and rural communities that surround Seattle.
Washington State Digital Archives: The home page offers a search box, but the collections link will reveal the projects undertaken by this state’s digitization program. You can search through materials such as birth records, photographs, physicians’ records and more, and many of these records contain individual images which can be viewed on this website.
Washington State Digital Collections: This is another collaborative collection that gathers archival materials from statewide public libraries, university holdings, and museums that chronicle this state’s history.
West Virginia
West Virginia History Online: The digital collections in this archive are primary sources that have been digitized and organized by collection and database. The photographs contains the most comprehensive collection of historic images pertaining to West Virginia in existence, and the Child Ballads of West Virginia are performed on audio files by Patrick Ward Gainer (1904-1981). This latter collection is a selection of British folksongs cataloged in Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads as discovered in Appalachia.
West Virginia Memory Project: This collection includes searchable databases, photographs, and documents. Some of the topics don’t contain explanatory notes, so searching the databases might prove frustrating unless you know exactly what you need. This project is part of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History site, where you can find more online materials.
Wisconsin
The State of Wisconsin Collection: The State of Wisconsin Collection brings together, in digital form, two categories of primary and secondary materials: writings about the State of Wisconsin and unique or valuable materials that relate to its history and ongoing development. Books, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, maps and other resources deemed important to the study and teaching of the State of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin Electronic Reader: This site offers transcribed stories, essays, letters and poems that are illustrated and that focus on Wisconsin history from 1835 to 1949.
Wisconsin Heritage Online: WHO is an expanding digital collection, featuring documentary sources and material culture from Wisconsin libraries, archives, and museums.
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Resources within the UWDCC collections are free and publicly accessible online. They are loosely organized into collections that span a range of subjects including art, ecology, literature, history, music, natural resources, science, social sciences, the State of Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin. Digital resources include text-based materials such as books, journal series, and manuscript collections; photographic images; slides; maps; prints; posters; audio; and video.
Wisconsin Historical Society: The online exhibits at this site include items as “Pottery by Frackelton,” “Advertising posters from the McCormick- International Harvester Collection,” and more. This information-rich site also contains genealogical materials, information about historic buildings, and historical images.
Wyoming
University of Wyoming Digital Initiative: This Web site showcases the online multimedia collections built by the University of Wyoming’s digital initiative. Browse through general collections and wildlife, geography, and living sections.
Wyoming State Archives: Wyoming research had been made easy through this site, as it offers online collections of historical documents, historical trails, and genealogical materials. Some collections are merely described or inventoried and not offered online.
Multi-State Resources
The following resources are projects that range from the efforts between two states to larger collections that focus on the development of the entire U.S.
American Centuries: This site features a digital collection of approximately 2000 objects and transcribed document pages from Memorial Hall Museum and Library. The focus is a view from New England on the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
American Journeys: This site contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.
Boston Library Consortium: The list found through this link contains universities and institutions located in the New England area, and each link leads to digitization projects that are currently underway. Some of those projects are listed in this article, but you’ll find many more sites at this resource.
Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive: CRBEHA is a project of Washington State University Vancouver, the Idaho State Historical Society, Oregon Historical Society, Washington State Historical Society, and Washington State University Pullman. This site brings together selected highlights of the ethnic collections from leading repositories in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
Combined Arms Research Library: These electronic collections are largely composed of digital versions of paper documents from the Combined Arms Research Library collections (CARL). The researcher can discover texts that reach from obsolete military manuals to WWII operational documents.
Digital Archive of American Architecture: This archive is maintained by the Fine Arts Department at Boston College, and examples and accompanying text range from the seventeenth century to current urban projects.
Digital Library of Appalachia: The DLA provides online access to archival and historical materials related to the culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The contents of the DLA are drawn from special collections of Appalachian College Association member libraries located in states such as Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky.
Documenting the American South: DocSouth is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supports this site. Although some collections focus entirely on North Carolina, other resources, such as “Southern Homefront: 1861-1865” provide materials from across the south.
Early Americas Digital Archive: EADA is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.
Fish and Wildlife Digital Library System: Use the search engine or browse list of hyperlinked keywords to find recent images of Alaska, the northeast U.S. and in other regional categories, and historic images as well. Most, if not all, the images are 5″ x 7″, suitable for printing, and free for public use.
Library of Congress: Although this site is widely known for its popular American Memory project, there’s more to this site and it’s worth the time to explore their digital collections. Their “Chronicling America”project, for example, allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Making of America: This link will take you to Cornell University’s collection, which contains almost 1,000 volumes of 22 journals from the 19th century. This is a collaborative effort with the University of Michigan.
Matrix: With the support of MSU faculty, the College of Arts and Letters, and the H-Net Council, a Center was established to host all of H-Net’s computing and administrative facilities at Michigan State and to pursue a broad research program in humanities computing. Currently, the project extends beyond this collaboration to bring audio, video, text, and image files to the general public on subjects such as the African e-Journals Project, American Voices, and more.
Mountain West Digital Library: This site contains an aggregation of digital collections from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, and historical societies in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. The Mountain West defines the region of contributors, but the content extends far beyond the Mountain West and into different fields.
National Archives: This link will take you to this site’s online exhibits, but you can find more resources throughout this site that lean toward genealogical and social history research.
National Park Service: This government organization provides a growing collection of thousands of images, documents, drawings and maps about the cultural and natural resources maintained by the National Park Service across the U.S. and its territories.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery: The digitization process is ongoing at this site, but they invite you to peruse the newspaper issues that they have put on line including the Civil War and the Turn of the Century 1900-1907. They also include a section on antique books that they are in process of digitizing.
Oyez: This project provides access to more than 2000 hours of Supreme Court audio. All audio in the Court recorded since 1995 is included here. Before 1995, the audio collection is selective.
Rocky Mountain Online Archive: RMOA is serving as a repository for archival collections in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.
Northwest Digital Archives: The Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) provides enhanced access to archival and manuscript collections in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. These materials include correspondence, diaries, or photographs, and digital reproductions of primary sources are available in some cases.
United States Digital Map Archive: The United States Digital Map Library is a USGenWeb Archives project, developed in April of 1999. This project and its all-volunteer staff are dedicated to free, online access for the general public. The maps usually are large, and they offer images for every state and often for many counties within these states.
Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Archive: This collection features a digital image archive that showcases the Mississippi River region along the Illinois/Iowa border. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs were gathered from the collections of Davenport Public Library, Augustana College, and Musser Public Library in Muscatine.
USC Digital Library: The University of South Carolina provides resources for the general public, including broadsides from the Colonial Era to the present, the travel journal and album of collected papers of William Tennent III, 1740 – 1777, and more.
Valley of the Shadow: This is a project produced by the University of Virginia, and it details life in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania during the Civil War.
Western Waters Digital Library: WWDL contains government reports, classic water literature, legal transcripts, water project records, personal papers, photographic collections, and video materials about the Columbia, Colorado, Platte, and Rio Grande river basins. This site is a collaborative regional project created by twelve university libraries in eight western states.
WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections: Washington State University offers textual, image, and photographic collections online and to the general public. Some materials are merely described rather than offered online, such the audio collections (although you can find abstracts on some of these materials).
Larger Collections
These selections are gathered mainly from U.S. university resources, but other projects – including government and overseas efforts – are included.
Maps
Alexandria Digital Library: ADL is a distributed digital library with collections of georeferenced materials such as maps, aerial photographs and remote sensing (satellite) data. The site is supported by University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Ryhiner Map Collection: This collection consists of more than 16,000 maps, charts, plans and views from the 16th to the 18th century, covering the whole globe. Together with the 20,000 manuscript maps of the State Archives, the Canton of Berne owns not only a local, but a worldwide geographical memory.
Medical
National Library of Medicine: NLM, which is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world’s largest medical library. The Library collects materials and provides information and research services in all areas of biomedicine and health care.
Sciences
American Museum of Natural History: The digital library project on this site was launched in 1999 to develop an integrated database of library resources and natural history collections. The first major project of the Digital Library focuses on the Museum’s Congo Expedition, 1909-1915.
Ethnomathematics Digital Library: The Ethnomathematics Digital Library (EDL) is a resource network and interactive learning community for ethnomathematics, with emphasis on the indigenous mathematics of the Pacific region. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is extensively involved in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education (SMETE), and has funded the EDL as a collections project of the National SMETE Digital Library (NSDL).
Ewell Sale Stewart Library: Digital collections from this library focus on natural sciences, including “Fairy Tale World of Henry McCook: Illustrations of Anthropomorphic Arthropods in the 19th Century,” which will be added on an ongoing basis. This site is part of the Academy of Natural Sciences, located in Philadelphia.
Exploratorium Digital Library: The different collections in this K-12 library include digital media and digitized museum materials related to interactive exhibits and scientific phenomena, including images, educational activities in PDF and html formats, QuickTime movies, streaming media, and audio files.
National Science Digital Library: NSDL is the Nation’s online library for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Access to most of the resources discovered through NSDL is free; however, some content providers may require a login, or a nominal fee or subscription to retrieve their specific resources.
National Sea Grant Library: NSGL is the official NOAA Sea Grant archive and home to a comprehensive collection of Sea Grant–funded documents from over 30 programs and projects across the U.S. Topics include oceanography, marine education, aquaculture, fisheries, aquatic nuisance species, coastal hazards, seafood safety, limnology, coastal zone management, marine recreation, and law.
Other
Arts and Humanities Data Service: AHDS is a UK national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities. Currently, they cover five subject areas: archaeology, history, visual arts, performing arts, and literature, languages and linguistics.
Berkeley SunSITE: The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide. If this doesn’t satisfy you, visit the list of Berkeley’s libraries to search for more digital collections such as the Bancroft Library – this site holds public access documents for topics such as JARDA (Japanese-American Relocation Digital Archives) and links to OAC-specific projects.
CARLI Digital Collections: This collection includes various images and texts from repositories such as the Newberry Library, Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Saint Francis, and more.
Center for Digital Initiatives: Brown University’s digital collections are derived from their signature collections, including African-American sheet music from 1820-1920 (includes complete sheets with music), Lincoln broadsides, Napoleonic satirical prints produced between 1792 and 1829, and more. The materials are all open access.
CHNM: George Mason’s Center for History and New Media contains an amazing amount of images and text that cover a broad range of topics. Visit the “projects” section to view the online materials.
Claremont Colleges Digital Library: Collections of images, video and text that range from fine arts to social sciences.
Columbia University Digital Collections: From information about the “Advanced Papyrological Information System” to notable New Yorkers, this site from Columbia University Libraries is free and open to the public.
Cornell University Library: Visit digital collections, exhibits, and partnership projects from this link. You can also gain access to more information through this university’s Windows on the Past site. Only one collection, the International Women’s Periodicals, is Cornell University access only.
Digital Activities and Collections: The University of Chicago Library creates a variety of online finding aids and retrospectively digitized collections and also supports related initiatives on campus by providing systems administration and programming support to faculty-driven projects and collections. Some resources point to other sources such as the Library of Congress.
Digital Library: The University of Colorado Digital Library is a collaborative project between the University of Colorado System and institutions of the Auraria Higher Education Campus. Collections include images, audio, and video files. Many of these resources are available to the general public, although some may carry copyright restrictions.
Digital Library Collections: Northwestern University Library, Illinois, provides various tools for the online researcher, including audio speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and more.
Digital Library of Information Science and Technology: dLIST is an open access archive for the Information Sciences, and is supported by the School of Information Resources and Library Science and Learning Technologies Center, University of Arizona.
George Mason Digitized Collections: Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) creates and maintains representative digital collections for an increasing amount of its holdings. You’ll discover information gathered from Virginia Civil War archive, 1893 Southwest photographs and more at this site.
GPB Digital Library: This site, supported by Georgia Public Broadcasting, offers an archive of many programs including their “Cover to Cover” series on books and other topics on sports, arts, and more.
Harold B. Lee Library: The digital collections on the Brigham Young University site include art collections, dissertations, text, and multimedia. You can also conduct searches at the Scholarly Periodicals Center.
IATH: The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University of Virginia. The research projects, essays, and documentation presented here are the products of a unique collaboration between humanities and computer science research faculty, computer professionals, student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff.
Indiana University Digital Library Program: DLP is dedicated to the production, maintenance, delivery, and preservation of a wide range of high-quality networked information resources for scholars and students at Indiana University and elsewhere. Some collections are contained within the site, and others link to other online libraries and repositories.
Internet Archive: IA, founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this site is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library. IA is mirrored at Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt to ensure the stability and endurance of the archives.
Internet Public Library: The Internet Public Library is hosted by The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, with major support from the College of Information at Florida State University and its founder, the University of Michigan School of Information. This collection provides a learning/teaching environment with subject collections, special collections, and other tools that you would find in any bricks and mortar library.
Michigan State University Libraries: The Digital & Multimedia Center of the Michigan State University Libraries serves both the MSU community and the worldwide academic community through digitization projects that preserve scholarly resources and make them more widely available. Categories in the digital collections range from Africana to veterinary medicine.
NYPL Digital: The New York Public Library Digital is your gateway to The Library’s rare and unique collections in digitized form. Find over 550,000 images from primary sources and printed rarities including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, illustrated books, and “printed ephemera.”
Office of Digital Collections and Research: The Office of Digital Collections and Research (DCR) of the University of Maryland Libraries provide extensive projects for online research.
Open Collections Program: Sponsored by Harvard University, this site offers information about projects such as ‘Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930,’ and ‘Women Working, 1800-1930.’ This site also provides a link to Harvard’s selection of Web-accessible collections.
Research in Computing for Humanities: RCH was founded at the University of Kentucky in 2001, and they work closely with the Special Collections and Digital Programs Division of the University of Kentucky Libraries and the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments and UK’s Center for Computational Sciences to develop their projects. The site isn’t easy to navigate, as projects are listed on various pages throughout this site. But you’ll discover their Electronic Beowulf and other projects under construction at the bottom of the page.
SCC – Digital Projects: The SCC (Scholarly Communications Center) promotes the communication of scholarly material by developing digital projects across a broad range of academic topics, in collaboration with librarians, teaching and research faculty, and the State of New Jersey. Hosted by Rutgers University Libraries, this list contains topics ranging from an alcohol history database to WILD (Women In Leadership Database), a portal to unique scholarly resources about women’s leadership found in selective archival and manuscript collections at Rutgers University. You may also find additional projects at the library’s Project Page.
Smithsonian Digital Library: From annual reports to trade literature, the Smithsonian offers readers, students, and teachers the materials they might need to supplement specific projects.
The European Library: This digital collection offers access to the resources of the 47 national libraries of Europe. The resources include books, magazines, journals, audio recordings and other materials.
Tufts Digital Library: TDL provides a general means of interacting with digital content created at Tufts University or created for use in teaching and research by Tufts faculty, staff and students. However, most of the projects – such as the oral interviews that have audio files and transcriptions of the files – are open access.
UBdigit: The University of Buffalo (NY) includes primarily collections of still images, but anticipates future inclusion of a variety of digital media formats, including audio, video, kinetic images, animation, virtual reality, interactive sequences and multi-media constructs. At present, they carry projects that range from American literature to psychology.
UFDC Digital Collections: The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) is a research tool that enables a user to find unique and rare digitized materials held at the University of Florida (UF) and partner institutions. The repository holds a wide assortment of materials from arts, humanities, and social sciences to world projects such as the Africana Collection. Some resources are limited to university use only.
UCLA Library Digital Collections: This library offers broad public access to their digital collections, which include images, project papers, and photographs.
University of Minnesota Digital Collections Unit: The Visual History Archive alone contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies, and this is just one project among many available at this digital library. Search images to find items in topics that range from African-American Literature Cover Art to World War I & II Posters.
University of Oregon Libraries Digital Collections: This collection includes art images, a historical photography collection, a print collection and more. A number of collections are in the planning or development stages, including a “Medieval Manuscripts” collection and aerial photographs.
University of Tennessee Digital Collections: This site carries several projects that range from historical photograph collections to current collections gathered by this university’s Herbarium. Other projects include early images of Egypt and electronic theses and dissertations.
University of Washington Digital Collections: This site features materials from the University of Washington Libraries, University of Washington Faculty and Departments, and organizations that have participated in partner projects with the UW. The huge amount of material offered ranges from art and architecture to international and ethnic collections.
WRLC Libraries Digital and Special Collections: The Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) provides staff and systems to manage digitizing projects, scan materials, and enter descriptive information developed in conjunction with library staff. Their members include institutions such as the Catholic University of America, American University, George Mason University and more.
Yale Digital Collections: A short list of the resources available online from Yale University Libraries is available here. Access to some collections is restricted to on-campus use only.
eTexts and eBooks
The following resources hold texts and digitized images of documents with very few other resources such as photographs, audio, etc.
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts: “The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 “classic” public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.”
American Verse Project: This project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry is being converted into digital form.
Bartleby: Brought to readers from Columbia University, this site reproduces classic literature in hypertext and maintains a strong emphasis on the quality and integrity of the text.
BiblioVault: University of Chicago Press, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, developed this resource that serves more than 50 university presses and contains digital files for more than 12,500 books.
Carrie: Lynn H. Nelson, creator of CARRIE, is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kansas. The site is now part of the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. It contains archival materials from WWI, the López Martín Collection, and other documents.
CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of 935 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the other arts.
Digital Library of the Commons: DLC is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons. You’ll also find a new online photo collection from this link.
DRUM: The Digital Repository at the University of Maryland provides links to various faculty-contributed research and publications, UM theses and dissertations from December 2003 forward, and collections of technical reports. The site is slightly confusing, but when you search for a document, you need to scroll down the page to gain access to the file. These files are all open access.
Electronic Text Center: This digital collection, sponsored by the University of Virginia, is an on-line archive of standards-based texts and images in the humanities, The collection is offered in fifteen different languages.
ePage@Tech: This is Georgia Tech’s resource page for electronic texts, including theses and dissertations. Most of this collection is open access.
Google Book Search: This database continues to grow, with more than a hundred thousand titles added by publishers and authors and some 10,000 works in the public domain now indexed and included in search results. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format.
Humanities Text Initiative: The Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan’s Digital Library Production Service, has provided online access to full text resources since 1994. You’ll gain open access to text collections including the Making of America site, which holds over 12,639 volumes containing 3,792,847 pages of e-text. This is a collaborative effort with Cornell University.
Hypertexts: The University of Virginia comes through again with electronic texts that focus on American studies. The Yellow Pages on this site lists the online texts by topics that range from ethnicity to science and technology.
Internet Library of Early Journals: This is a joint project offered the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford (UK) that aims to digitize substantial runs of 18th and 19th century British journals. They make these images available on the Internet, along with associated bibliographic data.
Internet Sacred Text Archive: John B. Hare has an academic background in linguistics, anthropology and computer science, and he worked in the high technology field as a computer programmer and entrepreneur for twenty five years prior to starting this site, which is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics.
National Academies Press: Viewers can gain access to more than 3,700 books online free, and purchase from more than 1,900 PDFs listed on the site. When you click on a book, you may need to scroll down the page to find the full free text listed on the left.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: NDLTD is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations.
Online Books Page: the University of Pennsylvania lists over 25,000 free books on the Web. Some books are hosted at the site, other listings point to other Web sites that carry full text transcriptions or page images.
Oxford Text Archive: The Oxford Text Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic primary source materials. OTA holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora.
Penn Libraries: Scroll down to “Locally developed digital collections,” and you’ll discover open access projects such as SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, the Furness Collection Images (Shakespeare and English Renaissance), and more. Some projects are Penn access only.
Perseus: The Department of Classics at Tufts University, Boston, offers this digital library project that includes collections of humanities resources. If you experience difficulties with the site you can try to access the mirror sites in Berlin or in Chicago.
Project Gutenberg: Michael Hart founded this collection in 1971, and it’s now known as the oldest digital library. Most of the over 22,000 items in this collection consist of full texts of books in the public domain. Many independent organizations that share Project Gutenberg’s ideals have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark.
Royal National Institute for the Blind: The RNIB digital collection contains a talking book service, where users can gain access to 14,000 mostly unabridged titles in popular fiction, classic titles and non-fiction for people of all ages. The books can be ‘read’ on special DAISY(Digital Accessible Information System) players.
The Internet Classics Archive: Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and “reader’s choice” Web sites. You’ll discover mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation. The site is housed at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Tribal Writers Digital Library: The Sequoyah Research Center, located in Little Rock, Arkansas, supports the activities of the American Native Press Archives (ANPA). The ANPA digital text project brings out-of-print literary efforts of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and First Nations people of Canada to readers world wide. Viewers can copy these resources freely for personal use, research, and teaching (including distribution to classes) as long as a statement of reference is included.
UMDL Texts: UMDL Texts is the central access point for electronic books and journals provided by the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Browse through collections that focus on historical and current texts on dentistry, poetry, and more.
University of Georgia Digital Books: Download the DjVu plugin to view digitally enhanced works (deWorks), in addition to searchable book facsimiles, broadsides, posters, photographs, maps, manuscripts, transcripts, newspapers, and periodicals.
Wright American Fiction Project: This site is part of the LETRS project at Indiana University. The books, which were written from 1851 – 1875, include full texts online that are searchable by author, title, and phrases.
Directories
The links listed below will provide you with much more information on various research topics, and they’ll direct you to finding those resources online in most cases.
Digital Librarian: Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York, manages this list of categorized Web sites that’s very similar to the Yahoo! Directory.
Digital Library Federation Collections Registry: You’ll find a web-searchable database of nearly 300 public domain online digital collections. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of libraries and related agencies that are pioneering in the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their collections and services.
Digital Library for International Research: The Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS) sponsor DLIR. They provide on-line public access catalog containing the records of all the holdings in all participating libraries. They also deliver important bibliographic and full-text primary and secondary source information from all CAORC member centers, covering both print collections and research collections in other media.
ibiblio: ibiblio.org is a “collection of collections,” including links to sites that contain software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration between the Center for the Public Domain and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Library Without Walls: Library Without Walls customers use the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s digital library technology to access a wealth of scientific and technical resources worldwide from the desktop, anytime, anywhere.
National Transportation Library: The National Transportation Library works to bring together transportation libraries, information centers and information resource professionals to improve access to transportation resources and develop transportation knowledge networks. Your searches will take you to Web sites that focus on trains, automobiles, etc.
OAIster: OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. They provide access to these digital resources by “harvesting” their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), so you can use phrase to find documents rather than remember titles and authors.
The British Columbia Digital Library: This is a comprehensive guide to digital library collections, primarily text-based ones, and digital library construction technology in BC and around the world. Some databases are out of date, but you can still use these collections for direction.
October 7, 2017
Civil War Soldier Database
https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-soldiers.htm
Government Land Records through BLM
https://glorecords.blm.gov/search/default.aspx#searchTabIndex=0&searchByTypeIndex=0
- Millions of Homestead Act (and Other) Land Records Are Free Online from the BLM article https://familyhistorydaily.com/free-genealogy-resources/blm-land-patents-homestead-act/
How to use Pinterest for Genealogy
http://www.genealogygirltalks.com/2014/05/how-to-use-pinterest-for-genealogy.html
http://www.genealogygirltalks.com/2014/05/how-to-use-pinterest-for-genealogy.html
The Forgotten Federal Census of 1885 Can Be Found Online for Free
50 Free Family History Sites article
https://familyhistorydaily.com/genealogy-resources/50-free-genealogy-sites/
November 10, 2016
March 1, 2016
Tutorial on Scanning Photos withYour Mobile Phone
This is an amazing DIY from Instructables. It shows you how to create a lightbox you can use to photograph a page in book or photo album with your phone camera. This would be great for converting photo albums to digital files.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Scan-Photo-With-Your-Mobile-Phone/step2/Measure-draft-and-cutout/
January 11, 2015
January 9, 2015
Newspapers from West Texas
JANUARY 23, 2016. ROLLOUT OF MATADOR DIGITIZED NEWSPAPER at the Motley County Library in Matador, Texas. Representatives of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library will roll-out the digitized newspaper for Matador, Texas. Included in the presentation will be actual “how-tos” on accessing the online digital collection and navigating the website that is open access to everyone. The event will also be most valuable to anyone interested in having a newspaper collection digitized. The Southwest Collection has long been one of the main institutions to microfilm West Texas newspapers. Its collection is one of the largest in the state. However, in recent years, the emphasis has shifted to digitization. The SWC/SCL newspaper collection can be accessed at https://swco-ir.tdl.org/swco-ir/ --simply scroll down to and click “newspapers.” For more information email Freedonia Paschall at freedonia.paschall@ttu.edu or call 806-742-3749
November 19, 2015
Tips for Saving Digitized Images
Below are tips for saving scanned photos and documents from Genealogy Insider. Click the link to read the rest of the article.
In general, the higher the resolution (measured in dpi, for dots per inch), the more you can enlarge the image without getting that grainy, pixilated look. But higher-resolution files also are bigger and hog space on your computer or in your cloud storage, so you don't want to scan everything at the highest-available dpi. Instead, go with these rules of thumb:
Remember that you can always downsave a copy to a lower resolution, but you can't add image quality without re-scanning the original.
November 5, 2015
Check out these sources for finding ancestors' parents from Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems
6 Record Sources that May Name Your Ancestors' Parents
August 5, 2015
I've disliked writing citations since my days of term and college papers... and I admit to being bad at citing my sources for genealogy. Using this information from Family Tree newsletter, I plan to be better at it. : ) Maybe this will help you, too.
July 23, 2015
48 Ancestry.com Search Tips free e-book
June 17, 2015
- See more at: http://ftu.familytreemagazine.com/find-your-ancestors-in-us-census-records/#sthash.MqdGQjGW.dpuf
This list is from Family Tree Magazine on the 75 Best State Records Online. Visit the pages as you need them.
ALABAMA
Click on Search Our Collections to search for a name in Civil War service cards, 1867 voter registrations and WWI soldiers’ records.
Among the digitized records you’ll find from archives and libraries across the state are naturalization records, school yearbooks and Civil War diaries and letters.
ALASKA
Resources for genealogists include indexes to naturalization records (1888-1972) and probate records (1883-1960) and guidelines for requesting information from the archives.
ARIZONA
This database indexes more than 111,000 names in the Arizona State Library’s collection of books, newspaper articles, periodicals, obituaries and vertical files.
The Grand Canyon State has updated this site with new records. You now can search for births from 1855 to 1940 and deaths from 1870 to 1965, and view the original records online.
Digitized items from museums and historical societies across the state include oral interviews, city directories, tax rolls and photos of pioneer settlers.
ARKANSAS
Search for a name in over 1.1 million gravestone photos from all over the Natural State. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s modest gravestone is there, along with a biography.
Arkansas State Archives
Search for a name in county, military, land and church records, as well as obituaries, manuscripts and photographs. The records aren’t online, but this catalog is a helpful finding tool.
CALIFORNIA
This site puts at your fingertips more than 15 million articles (almost twice as many as last year) in California newspapers dating from 1846 to the present.
Click the Databases tab to search 350,000 records in the California Names Index for free. A lookup in the original source costs $10. Members also get online access to San Francisco church records and newspaper notices.
Use this site as a portal to view more than 220,000 digital images and documents from collections of diaries, letters, photographs and other items at more than 200 libraries, museums, historical societies and university archives across the Golden State.
COLORADO
This search scours millions of entries in original sources, including county birth and death registers, a statewide divorce index (1880-1939) and will and probate records. You can order copies of the original records for a fee.
A search of the genealogy collections covers indexes to marriages (1858-1939), military records, biographies, obituaries, the 1885 Colorado state census, cemetery records and naturalization records (1877-1952).
CONNECTICUT
Founded by genealogist Jane Devlin and now run by her family, this site provides free access to many genealogy resources from the New England and Mid-Atlantic states. Connecticut collections include indexes to church, cemetery, census and other records.
Search and view 27 collections of digitized books, diaries, photographs, court records, witchcraft trial records, newspapers, vital record indexes and more.
DELAWARE
Click on the Digital Archives link to access Civil War records, naturalization records, historical maps and more. Click on Research, then on Collection Gateway to search indexes to bastardy bonds, death registers and probate records. You can order copies of the records for a fee.
FLORIDA
Click on the Collections tab to access free databases from the State Library and Archives of Florida. Records include Confederate pension applications, WWI service cards, 1867-1868 voter registration rolls and Spanish land grants. Click on the Photographs tab to search a collection of more than 197,000 digitized photographs.
GEORGIA
If your ancestors hail from the Peach State, you can cover a lot of ground here with a single search covering digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, newspapers and more from 60-plus libraries, archives and museums and 100 government agencies.
Click on Virtual Vault at the right to search colonial wills, Confederate pension applications, death certificates (1914-1930) and the General Name File.
HAWAII
Under Research Our Records, click on Genealogical Indexes to search marriage, divorce, citizenship and death records. You can order copies of the records for a fee. Click on City Directories to view digitized copies from 1880 to 1924. Click on Hawaii Newspapers to access a search form for newspapers from 1834 to 2000. Note that as of press time, the searchable resources under the Digital Collections link (vital records, land records, passenger lists and WWI service records) have yet to return online after undergoing system maintenance.
IDAHO
Search for your ancestor in the Gem State with these indexes to naturalization records, Civil War veterans, pension records, the inmate catalog and the Idaho Biographical Index. When you find a promising reference, contact the archives for more details.
ILLINOIS
Digital collections on this site come from the Illinois State Library and other libraries, and include oral histories, maps, manuscripts, letters, photographs and newspapers.
INDIANA
Search indexes to more than 1.2 million records with information on veterans’ graves registrations, naturalization indexes and more.
In the site index at the left, click on Databases and Indexes and scroll down to Resources Provided by the Indiana State Library. There, search indexes to marriages (1811-2013), commercial newspaper death listings, biographies and newspapers. Indiana Memory has digitized images of many resources, including county histories, oral histories, plat books, city directories, photos, newspapers, yearbooks and more. The VINE database has local history and vital records from libraries, historical societies and genealogical societies.
IOWA
Here’s a sample of what you might find in this fascinating collection: Andrew F. Davis describes his fellow soldiers in a letter to his wife dated May 9, 1861: “A great many are genteel well dressed gentlemenly men, and then again there is a great many of the most abandoned dirty ragged lousyest looking mortals that you ever saw.” You can search the collection, or browse the collection by type (diaries, correspondence, photographs) or by year (1862-1865).
Civil War diaries, county atlases, biographies and school yearbooks are just some of the digitized items you can view from Iowa libraries, museums and historical societies.
KANSAS
Two large indexes on this site will help you find your ancestors in the Sunflower State. The Kansas Names Index covers the 1895 state census, biographies, marriages, death notices and more. The Kansas Military Index has records from the Civil War to the present. Select Photo Orders from the Research tab for instructions on how to order copies.
KENTUCKY
Search digital images of more than a million items from the Bluegrass State, including books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, oral histories, yearbooks and pictures.
LOUISIANA
Click on Locate Historical Records to search indexes to death records (mostly 1804-1965), birth records (mostly 1790-1915) and Orleans parish marriages (1831-1965). Other online databases cover passenger lists from January to July 1851 and Confederate pension applications.
MAINE
Developed and managed by the Maine Historical Society, this site lets libraries and historical societies across the state upload digital copies of historical items from their collections into this site’s database. The site has more than 45,000 historical items (more than double last year’s count), including letters, photos, maps, clothing and audio and video files.
MARYLAND
Hover your mouse cursor over Find Records and select Family Historians for links to guides to genealogical research and various indexes. Then click on Search Online Databases to access death indexes and databases of slaves and early settlers. Next, select Archives of Maryland Online to access 471,000-plus historical documents. While visiting the Archives of Maryland Online, click on Probate Records for an index to colonial probate records (1634-1777) and on Military Records for Revolutionary War and Civil War resources.
MASSACHUSETTS
Explore digitized photographs, maps, postcards, manuscripts, books and artifacts from libraries, museums and archives across Massachusetts.
MICHIGAN
Click on Online Collections to access more than a million digitized records, including death records (1897-1952), state census records (1827-1894), Civil War service records, letters, diaries, photographs and plat maps. Click on Advanced Search to select one or more collections to search.
Search indexes to more than 2.75 million marriages, deaths, obituaries and other records, including more than 250,000 new records since last year, for free. You can order copies of most records for $5.
MINNESOTA
The Genealogy Database covers birth, marriage and cemetery records from the Iron Range in northern Minnesota, and alien registrations, naturalization records and obituaries from across the state. Order a copy of a record for $10.
This collection includes more than 50,000 digitized items from the state’s cultural heritage organizations. You’ll find newspapers, photographs, diaries, maps, plat books, oral interviews and more.
MISSISSIPPI
This page describes the archives’ most commonly used genealogical resources. Click on Digital Archives to view Confederate Pension applications and WWI statement of service cards and indexes. Use the online catalog to identify the archives’ holdings relevant to your Mississippi family.
Libraries, colleges and historical and genealogical societies contributed scrapbooks, letters, photographs, books, oral histories and the large collection of family histories digitized on this site.
MISSOURI
Access more than 9 million death, military, naturalization and other records from around the state through the main search form. Click on Browse Collections by Topic, then Genealogy to search individual databases.
This site features a large newspaper collection, plus diaries, plat maps, photographs, oral histories and Civil War letters, as well as newsletters published by local historical and genealogical societies.
MONTANA
Use the search box to find a name in digitized newspapers, yearbooks, prison records, photographs and more from archives across the Treasure State.
NEBRASKA
Under the Search Collections tab, select Additional Research Databases to access indexes to names in cemetery records, county atlases, plat books and prison records. The 1860-1954 Tract Books Index covers the first owners of land in Nebraska.
NEVADA
The Nevada State Digital Archives has more than half a million online records, including territorial census records (1861-1864), state land patents (1865-2013) and records of prisoners and orphans.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
This extensive guide to researching your family history in New Hampshire covers all the major record groups and has numerous links to online resources. It even has detailed guides to every county and many towns in the state.
NEW JERSEY
Click on Searchable Databases and Online Records Request Forms to access indexes to marriage records (1666-1799 and 1848-1878), and indexes to death records (1878-1895). The searchable databases cover more than 1 million references to documents and photographs.
NEW MEXICO
Access digitized manuscripts, including genealogies, photographs, oral histories and maps from libraries and museums across New Mexico. The Newspapers Database (accessible via the Advanced Search options or under the Browse All Collections pull-down menu) tells where copies are available and includes links to digitized copies of some titles.
NEW YORK
Thanks to the coordinated efforts of volunteers in these two groups, you can search indexes to births, marriages, deaths, naturalizations and church records in New York City and Long Island.
With 5 million more newspaper pages than last year, this site now tops more than 35 million newspaper pages (1726-2015) that you can search by word or phrase. Despite the name, Thomas Tryniski’s site has newspapers from all over New York, plus some from other states and Canada. To download the full list of titles, click on FAQ_HELP_INDEX at the top of the screen, then “to browse the different papers, click Here,” and then “Download this index as a Microsoft Excel file.”
This index covers more than 274,000 New York wills. Browse by county or click Search This Site to search for a name on the whole site. In the FREEFind box, type the last name first and put quotations around the name to search on the phrase, such as “Robertson John.” Optionally, add a town or county (“Robertson John” Worcester) to narrow the search.
NORTH CAROLINA
A joint project of the state archives and state library, this site has digitized Confederate pension applications, naturalizations, Bible records and newspapers back to the 1700s. The Family Records collection groups the most useful records for genealogy, including marriage and death notices and cemetery records. Our list previously included this site as part of the State Archives of North Carolina.
With contributions from cultural heritage institutions across the state, this site has digitized newspapers, yearbooks, photographs, city directories, genealogies, yearbooks and more.
NORTH DAKOTA
Town and county histories, photos of homesteaders and oral interviews conducted with Germans from Russia dating back to the 1800s are just a few of this site’s treasures depicting life on the northern plains.
OHIO
A collaborative project of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, this collection includes items from more than 360 cultural heritage institutions. You’ll find yearbooks, county atlases, photos of Civil War officers, more than 315,000 newspaper pages (nearly 100,000 more than last year) and much more.
OKLAHOMA
This site from the Oklahoma Department of Libraries and its partners has digitized books, newspapers, photos and documents, including Confederate pension records and cards.
Key collections here include Civil War soldiers’ personal narratives, trabscribed interviews with Oklahomans from the 1930s and more than 200 manuscript collections about Native Americans.
OREGON
This site’s Early Oregonians Database documents people who lived in Oregon prior to statehood. The Oregon Historical County Records Guide includes county maps, histories and record inventories. Search for relatives in the Oregon Historical Records Index to birth, marriage, death, divorce, naturalization, probate and other county records.
PENNSYLVANIA
You can now search each collection here individually or all at once to access digitized photos and documents from
libraries. The resources from across Pennsylvania are grouped by subject, such as genealogy, local newspapers, Pennsylvania history and yearbooks.
In addition to research guides and finding aids, this site has several online record collections. Military records date back to the Revolutionary War, and many of them include soldiers’ physical descriptions. Land records (1684-present) include browsable indexes. You also can browse statewide birth (1906-1910) and death (1906-1965) indexes.
RHODE ISLAND
More than just an index to gravestones, this site includes dates of birth and death, names of family members and maps of cemetery locations. Many entries include detailed descriptions and photos of the gravestones.
SOUTH CAROLINA
Click on the Online Research tab, then on Online Records Index to search more than 300,000 items (many with images). They include records of Confederate veterans (1909-1973), criminal court records, state land-grant plats (1784-1868), legislative papers (1782-1866), will transcripts (1782-1855) and school insurance photos (1935-1952).
This collection of 200,000 items from 40 cultural heritage institutions across the Palmetto State includes family histories, yearbooks, oral histories, maps, photographs and family Bible records.
SOUTH DAKOTA
Find your ancestors in the Mount Rushmore State with the help of these indexes to naturalizations, cemetery records and biographies, plus a transcript of the 1885 census of Civil War veterans.
TENNESSEE
Search digitized photos, letters, diaries, oral histories and artifacts in archives, libraries and museums across the state. You’ll find many Civil War-related items, including letters from soldiers, photographs of veterans and pictures of relics.
TEXAS
Libraries, archives, historical societies and genealogical societies from across the state have contributed more than 750,000 digitized books, maps and photos for this website. You’ll also find college yearbooks, county probate records and newspapers.
UTAH
This database contains cemetery records for about 600,000 people buried in Utah and more burials are continually being added. Information comes from both sexton’s records and gravestones.
The Utah State Archives created this convenient list of online records searchable by name. In addition to images of death certificates from 1904 to 1965, you also can search birth registers and other records from several counties.
VERMONT
Under the Research tab, select Genealogy, then Genealogy Indexes & Lists for links to PDF files with indexes and transcriptions of various records, including baptisms, marriages, deaths, naturalizations and town records.
This extensive collection includes profiles, photos and gravestones of Civil War soldiers with any connection to Vermont. Click Name Search to search the site for an ancestor’s name.
VIRGINIA
Among the many useful indexes and digitized documents on this site, don’t overlook the index to wills and administrations up to 1800. The Library of Virginia has a separate site for digitized materials at Virginia Memory. On that site, under the Digital Collections tab, select Collections by Topic. Under Military Service, see Revolutionary War records and Confederate pension rolls. Under Land Office Patents & Grants, access digitized records dating back to 1623.
WASHINGTON
Drawing on the collections of small, rural libraries and historical societies, this site has scrapbooks, oral interviews, old photographs and more.
This terrific site has more than 60 million searchable records online (7 million more than last year), including birth, marriage, death, census, cemetery and naturalization records.
WEST VIRGINIA
Vital records databases include digitized birth records (1790-1940), marriage records (1780-1971) and death records (1753-1965). The West Virginia Memory Project has indexes to Civil War records.
WISCONSIN
Resources from libraries, archives and historical societies across the state include county histories, diaries, genealogies, letters, local history, manuscripts, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, plat maps and yearbooks. Select Tips for Genealogists from the Explore tab for help searching.
Search more than 3 million records, including indexes to birth, marriage and death records, plus obituaries, biographies and photos. Scroll down the page for links to other resources, including Civil War records and local history and biography articles.
WYOMING
Search and view more than 800,000 newspaper pages, including newspapers published in Wyoming between 1849 and 1922. The site continues to add newspapers and has some titles up to 1989.
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Tutorial on Scanning Photos withYour Mobile Phone
This is an amazing DIY from Instructables. It shows you how to create a lightbox you can use to photograph a page in book or photo album with your phone camera. This would be great for converting photo albums to digital files.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Scan-Photo-With-Your-Mobile-Phone/step2/Measure-draft-and-cutout/
January 11, 2015
Check out these 4 ways of searching Google (which came from https://www.familytreeuniversity.com/ to aid in your genealogy research:
- Books
Google Books contains the largest online book collection and allows you to search them (yes, even inside the books themselves!) for information regarding your family history. You can start with an advanced book search on a person's first and last name plus a phrase like "genealogy" or "family" in the Subject box. I was able to find two books of family histories from the 1890 which were free to download. A real find. - Newspapers
The Google News Archive Search covers newspapers back to 1738! Search by name to find obituaries or browse a paper by date to get historical context and find out what was going on in your ancestor's life. - Images
Want to see if you can find digital images related to your ancestors or where they lived? Why not search Google Images? You might be surprised at what you find! Bonus tip: You don't have to restrict yourself to searching images; you can also search by image to find source information. - Maps
This is one of the most commonly used Google tools, but Google Maps and Google Earth can show you more than driving directions. Get an up close and personal look at the street your great-grandma grew up on, even if you can't make it there yourself with street view, and explore the historical maps and photographs on offer.
January 9, 2015
Newspapers from West Texas
JANUARY 23, 2016. ROLLOUT OF MATADOR DIGITIZED NEWSPAPER at the Motley County Library in Matador, Texas. Representatives of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library will roll-out the digitized newspaper for Matador, Texas. Included in the presentation will be actual “how-tos” on accessing the online digital collection and navigating the website that is open access to everyone. The event will also be most valuable to anyone interested in having a newspaper collection digitized. The Southwest Collection has long been one of the main institutions to microfilm West Texas newspapers. Its collection is one of the largest in the state. However, in recent years, the emphasis has shifted to digitization. The SWC/SCL newspaper collection can be accessed at https://swco-ir.tdl.org/swco-ir/ --simply scroll down to and click “newspapers.” For more information email Freedonia Paschall at freedonia.paschall@ttu.edu or call 806-742-3749
November 19, 2015
Tips for Saving Digitized Images
Below are tips for saving scanned photos and documents from Genealogy Insider. Click the link to read the rest of the article.
In general, the higher the resolution (measured in dpi, for dots per inch), the more you can enlarge the image without getting that grainy, pixilated look. But higher-resolution files also are bigger and hog space on your computer or in your cloud storage, so you don't want to scan everything at the highest-available dpi. Instead, go with these rules of thumb:
- If you plan to post the digitized image to a blog or website, the standard is 72 dpi.
- If you want to print the image at its original size, scan at least 300 dpi.
- If you're scanning old letters and other documents to archive, use 300 dpi. (But notes, receipts and papers you're not intending to archive are fine at 72 dpi.)
- If you plan to view the scanned photos on your HDTV screen, use a minimum of 300 dpi for 4x6-inch originals, and higher dpi for smaller originals.
- If you want to enlarge the photo up to double in size (for printing or on-screen zooming-in and examining), scan it at least 600 dpi.
- If you'll want to more than double the size of the original photo, go even higher with the dpi. At 900 dpi, a 4x6-inch printed photo turns into a 16x24-inch digital image.
- If the original photo is small, scan at 600 dpi or higher. If you scan a 2x3-inch photo at 1200 dpi, for example, it will become a 16x24-inch digital image without losing quality.
- If the original is a tintype or daguerreotype, scan at 1200 dpi.
- If you don't know how the digitized photo will be used or you're scanning it to archive for posterity, scan at least 600 and up to 1200 dpi.
Remember that you can always downsave a copy to a lower resolution, but you can't add image quality without re-scanning the original.
November 5, 2015
Check out these sources for finding ancestors' parents from Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems
Recently Genealogy Gems podcast listener and Gem Trisha wrote in with this question about finding marriage license applications online. She hoped the original application would name the groom's parents. Unfortunately, her search for the applications came up dry. So, she asked, "Are there other documents that would have his parents names listed on them?"
Here's a brainstorm for Trisha and everyone else who is looking for an ancestor's parents' names (and aren't we all!).
6 Record Sources that May Name Your Ancestors' Parents
1. Civil birth records. I'll list this first, because civil birth records may exist, depending on the time period and place. But in the U.S. they are sparse before the Civil War and unreliably available until the early 1900s. So before a point, birth records-which will almost always name at least one parent-are not a strong answer. Learn more about civil birth records in my free Family History Made Easy podcast episode #25.
2. Marriage license applications. Trisha's idea to look for a marriage license application was a good one. They often do mention parents' names. But they don't always exist: either a separate application form was never filled out, or it didn't survive. Learn more about the different kinds of marriage documents that may exist in the Family History Made Easy podcast episode #24.
3. Obituaries. Obituaries or death notices are more frequently found for ancestors who died in the late 1800s or later. Thanks to digitized newspapers, it's getting SO much easier to find ancestors' obituaries in old newspapers. My book How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers is packed with practical tips and inspiring stories for discovering your family's names in newsprint. Millions of newly-indexed obituaries are on FamilySearch (viewable at GenealogyBank). Get inspired with this list of 12 Things You Can Learn from Obituaries!
4. Social Security Applications (U.S.). In the U.S., millions of residents have applied for Social Security numbers and benefits since the 1930s. These applications request parents' names. There are still some privacy restrictions on these, and the applications themselves are pricey to order (they start at $27). But recently a fabulous new database came online at Ancestry that includes millions of parents' names not previously included in public databases. I blogged about it here . Learn more about Social Security applications (and see what one looked like) in the show notes for my free Family History Made Easy podcast episode #4.
5. Baptismal records. Many churches recorded children's births and/or the baptisms of infants and young children. These generally name one or both parents. Millions of church records have come online in recent years. Learn more about birth and baptism records created by churches in the Family History Made Easy Podcast Episode #26. Click these links to read more about baptismal records in Quebec and Ireland.
6. Siblings' records. If you know the name of an ancestor's sibling, look for that sibling's records. I know of one case in which an ancestor appeared on a census living next door to a possible parent. Younger children were still in the household. A search for one of those younger children's delayed birth record revealed that the neighbor WAS his older sister: she signed an affidavit stating the facts of the child's birth.
More Genealogy Gems on Finding Your Ancestors in Old Records:
Try These 2 Powerful Tools for Finding Genealogy Records Online
August 5, 2015
I've disliked writing citations since my days of term and college papers... and I admit to being bad at citing my sources for genealogy. Using this information from Family Tree newsletter, I plan to be better at it. : ) Maybe this will help you, too.
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July 23, 2015
101 Best Websites for Genealogy in 2015
7/21/2015
The 16th annual collection of the year's best websites in genealogy is here. Whether you're just starting out or you already have a large compilation of ancestry research, these websites are sure to enhance your investigating in a multitude of ways.
Time sure flies. This year marks the 16th birthday of our popular 101 best websites for genealogy feature. To celebrate this milestone birthday, we’ve divvied up this year’s honorees into 16 categories, spotlighting some old favorites along with a variety of new discoveries. The VIPs on our list range from data-rich sites to web tools we can’t imagine how we lived without.
As always, sites requiring payment to utilize most of their offerings are indicated with a $; sites that are mostly free with optional paid upgrades aren’t. Now won’t you help us celebrate this sweet 16 with some online family tree finds?
Click the category below to see the best websites from that category:
- Best Virtual Library Websites
- Best Big Genealogy Websites
- Best Historical Newspaper Websites
- Best Large-Database Genealogy Websites
- Best State Genealogy Websites
- Best Websites for Finding African-American Ancestry
- Best Military Genealogy Websites
- Best Family Tree Websites
- Best Geographical Genealogy Websites
- Best Genealogy Tech Tools
- Best Websites for Vital Records
- Best Immigrant Genealogy Websites
- Best Canadian Genealogy Websites
- Best Continental European Genealogy Websites
- Best Social Media Websites for Genealogy
- Best Genealogy Blogs
More Online:
Free Web Content
June 17, 2015
Download your free genealogy e-book of Find Your Ancestors in US Census Records!
DAR Information Online
The Daughters of the American Revolution Library (DAR) has a free online collection of searchable records. Its Genealogical Research System allows anyone to search databases of ancestors, descendants, members, its Genealogical Research Committee reports and more. Now it’s added another databases: Bible records. Look at the tabs on the top of the page.
Antiques Map Sites
Check your GPS and Google Earth. Then find the antique map to match for an interesting lesson in the "wheels of progress".
Geo Referencer A great tool that allows you to compare and superimpose antique maps with today's map.
The historical map collection has over 57,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, are also represented.
The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.
It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.
Library of Congress: Geography and Map Division Lots of information here.
The National Map: Historical Topographic Map Collection- This is maintained by the US Geological Survey, and will eventually contain over 200,000 topographic map images dating from 1884..
Newberry Library - The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and the online Newberry Library Cartographic Collection page.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection (Univ. of Texas) Especially check out the online state maps at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_sites/states_sites.html
The National Map: Historical Topographic Map Collection- This is maintained by the US Geological Survey, and will eventually contain over 200,000 topographic map images dating from 1884..
Newberry Library - The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and the online Newberry Library Cartographic Collection page.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection (Univ. of Texas) Especially check out the online state maps at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_sites/states_sites.html
United States Military Academy Digital Map Library maps and other antique military information
New York Public Library Click the research tab to view the information available
Osher Map Library (Univ. of Southern Maine) Among other things, this site has a search feature for pictures and information on ocean liners.
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library
County History and Local Listings
Finding your family and reading about them in a local or county history give us insight into our family's past. Below are some links to online resources but you can find county histories in the library, used bookstores and online booksellers.
County Histories Online
New York Public Library Click the research tab to view the information available
Osher Map Library (Univ. of Southern Maine) Among other things, this site has a search feature for pictures and information on ocean liners.
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library
County History and Local Listings
Finding your family and reading about them in a local or county history give us insight into our family's past. Below are some links to online resources but you can find county histories in the library, used bookstores and online booksellers.
County Histories Online
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