Other Resources
New resources are added to the Books We Own site every week, so check back often! In the meantime, if you can't find what you are looking for here, you may want to explore one of these other sites:
Electronic Books
- Google Books - has a large collection of public-domain histories and genealogies that can be searched online and/or downloaded as PDFs.
- "American Libraries" - an Internet Archives project, providing free texts of American history and genealogies that are no longer copyright-protected.
- HathiTrust Digital Library - partnership of over 90 research institutes and libraries working to digitaize and preserve their collections. Full text of many histories and biographies are available.
- Our Roots: Canada's Local Histories Online - hundreds of freely-available Canadian histories and genealogies.
- Family History Books - digitized books made freely available by FamilySearch.org
- EveryNameIndex.com - as the name implies, this site has freely-accessible lists of every-name indexes to a growing number of histories and genealogies. This is a great starting-point if you want to know if your ancestor is in a particular book before taking the time to hunt that book down. At the moment, the index includes books focusing on the midwest and eastern USA, but the site is regularly updated. [Thanks to BWO Volunteer Anne for alerting me to this resource!].
- Project Gutenberg - thousands of books available online, freely. Of special interest are many biographies and histories (such as the 21-volume History of Fredrich II of Prussia).
- Genealogy Gateway has linked to freely-available genealogy books, most posted on Google's Book Search site.
- ProQuest's Heritage Quest Online site has posted scanned images from several thousand genealogies, histories, telephone directories, and other items of genealogical interest. This site is a FEE-based subscription service. However, if your local public library, Family History Center or genealogical society has a subscription, you can access this site for free - your local library will have information on how to connect.
Lookup Volunteer Sites
- The USGenWeb Project is an excellent source of lookup volunteers - nearly every county page has at least one!
- Privately Owned Publications
- Cyndi's List has more lookup sites listed.
Other Links of Interest
- RootsWeb Home Page
- US Biographies Project - this project aims to transcribe and post biographies from genealogies and histories published prior to 1923.
- Newberry Library in Chicago - this resource was recommended by a look-up volunteer. Please note that they do charge a small fee for look-ups. "The Newberry Library in Chicago will search many of its different collections for people for a very reasonable fee. They were able to give me a copy of my great-grandfather's obituary."