Free Genealogy Resource: Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America is a constantly growing website that is loaded with free genealogy resources. It is also FREE! 

It links lots of libraries, archives and museums from all over the U.S. They contribute digitized items such as photographs, posters, and newspapers. It has links to the actual images of the items. It isn't just another index. This is the real deal! A great resource.

Be sure you check DPLA out! 

Genealogy Search tips for finding your Ancestors on Google

There are tons of resources out there these days to search your family tree. Here are a few search tips that will help you find what you are actually trying to find on google.

Quotation Marks

Make sure when you are searching google for your family member that you use "quotation marks".  This will help get you what you want. Without quotation marks google will return items that have either of your search terms and they don't have to be related to one another. With quotes you will get items that are more closely related and it will contain both of your search terms.

Site specific searches..

If you are looking to get search results from a certain website only you can limit your search just type the following:

Site:ancestory.com "john doe"  

This will return items on john doe from ancestory.com only.

Use a date range

Be sure to use dates in your searches when you can. Even if you don't know the actual dates just a date range you can narrow down your google search by adding dates.  This will help tremendously when you are hunting for birth, death, and marriages but are not sure of the exact dates. You do this by adding the DATE..DATE to the search.

You can simply add the following to your search: 1920..1925

So if I am hunting for John Doe who died between 1920 to 1925 then you can narrow down your results by searching the following:

"John Doe" 1920..1925 

The results will include at least one of the dates above. Please note this doesn't exclude other dates however there is a way to do that too!

Exclude results

If you are getting results that you would like to exclude because they are not what you need. For example: If your John Doe results keep giving you John Doe from SC and you know that your John Doe was from NC you can exclude that from your search. Simply use a minus sign to do so. You can exclude websites this way too. So you would type the following to search for John Doe without SC.

"John Doe" -SC

Search Page Titles or Page Text

You can search for page titles by adding the term allintitle: directly before your search terms. Then google will return websites whose titles are whatever you were searching for. You can also search only the page text by adding allintext: before your search terms. 

Example:

allintitle:"John Doe" would return pages titled John Doe

I hope that you find some of these tips useful! 

Legacy Family Tree program is currently my program of choice for keeping my family tree organized. I started with the free version then moved on to the deluxe version after I had played with it for a while. I had tried several other programs to keep my tree in prior to finding Legacy. 

There standard version is FREE. Can't get better than that right! Try it out now! 





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Free Genealogy Resources

Looking for free places to search for your ancestors? Here is a list of Free Sites to help you on your quest to find your ancestors.

CyndisList.com - here you will find links to family history news and genealogy research

FamilyTreeMagazine.com - lots of tips for record searches, information about ancestory, free info 

FindAGrave.com - this is a search index of graves by date or location

LibertyEllisFoundation.org - this is a database of over 51 million passenger records

AccessGenealogy - has a large collection of genealogy records


FamilySearch.org - this website is maintained by the Mormon church. It has a multitude of information from birth, death and marriage certs from various countries.


RootsWeb -  I have definitely spent a number of hours on this site. It is one of the larges free resources for genealogy information on the internet. 

USGenWeb - They have records for every state. They have census records, wills and cemetery transcriptions. 

International Genealogical Index aka IGI - has birth, death, and marriage records from North America and the UK

Interment.net - This site offers burial records from cemeteries from around the world. 






Some of our posts may contain affiliate links, which cost you nothing but do help support this site's maintenance and fees. See our full disclosure policy for more information.

Wow it has been a while!

Wow it has really been a while! I have missed searching for my family history. I plan to get back into it and start hunting down some more missing ancestors soon.  I have to try to remember all the ways I used to hunt and track my genealogy. I also need to update my files with deaths and births since I have been in la la land for a bit. I need to get our tree back online also. Currently the links aren't working. Lots to do!

I plan to update the blog with some useful tips and hints on how to go about searching for your ancestors. This will help other people who are searching as well as remind myself of how I went about it in the first place.