4
Online Databases
Whether you’re searching for birth data, passenger lists, or an old newspaper article, you have a good chance of finding it in an online database. New genealogy information is being posted online daily thanks to tens of thousands of individual websites and large commercial entities. Where to begin your search? In this chapter you’ll discover where to find the largest free and for-fee databases.
SUBSCRIPTION SITES
You’ll most likely find the greatest depth and breadth of genealogy data on a subscription site. Many of these sites allow you to search for free, but you’ll need to pay for a subscription to view the results.
Although subscription sites carry either a monthly or annual fee, they can often save you time because they contain information that you may not be able to access unless you’re in a genealogy library. Subscription sites typically have a free trial period; if you’re interested in the site, use this trial period to determine if the subscription provides good value for the cost.
ANCESTRY.COM <ancestry.com>
Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online collection of genealogy and family history information, with more than six billion records, 24 million reader-submitted family trees, and 60 million photos and stories. Ancestry’s holdings include:
• census indexes and images (U.S., Canada, UK)
• military records
• vital statistics
• immigration records
• maps
• newspapers
• voter lists
Search across all databases, Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com users can filter their searches by a specific database or type of document, or they can search across all databases.
Even if you don’t want to pay for a subscription to the site, explore Ancestry.com’s community features <community.ancestry.com>, which include free message boards and members directories. User-submitted family trees are available to everyone, not just paid subscribers. Because of the large number of subscribers (1.6 million), there’s an excellent chance you can network with another family researcher. When another Ancestry.com user saves data on one of the people in your tree, you’ll automatically receive a notification.
FOLD3.COM <fold3.com>
Through a partnership with the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and other institutions, fold3.com has digitized more than 73 million family history records.
In addition to providing subscription services, fold3.com also highlights free databases for anyone to use, such as Continental Congress papers and Matthew Brady’s Civil War images.
Estate inventory list, fold3.com
Among fold3.com’s most outstanding collections are military records from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, as well as Civil War service, pension, and widows records. You’ll also find images from the 1860, 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 federal censuses.
Like Ancestry.com, users can search fold3.com across all databases or employ a series of filters that include name, place, date, year, and collection. Users can also create their own pages, upload images, create annotations to existing material, and share research findings.
Beginning in late 2011, fold3.com (formerly footnote.com) began focusing on offering the finest and most comprehensive collection of U.S. military records available on the internet. Fold3.com is dedicated to preserving America’s military records, some of which are more than two hundred years old.
GENEALOGYBANK <genealogybank.com>
With more than five thousand newspapers—and millions of items—digitized, GenealogyBank has become a premier provider of historical newspaper records. Subscribers can also access historical books and documents as well as old and current obituaries.
The historical newspaper collection dates to 1690 and is fully searchable by name, state, date, and keywords. The collection includes newspapers printed in small towns and big cities throughout the United States.
The genealogy benefits of searching historical newspapers are many. Newspaper obituaries can hold the key to a genealogy puzzle. For example, do you remember Calvin Dimmitt from chapter one? His obituary (found at GenealogyBank.com) includes information about his illness, his marriage, his children, and place of burial. If his wife’s maiden name wasn’t already known, the obituary makes it clear. Remember this obituary when you get to chapter ten. You’ll see why an obituary can be so valuable.
WORLD VITAL RECORDS <worldvitalrecords.com>
This site offers a monthly or annual subscription rate and a thirty-day money-back guarantee. Search nearly four billion family history names and millions of vital records from the United States and thirty-nine counties.
Although World Vital Records is known for smaller and more unusual collections, like Navy cruise books and high school yearbooks, you’ll also find large data collections. Among them is the surname database from more than fifty years of Everton’s Genealogical Helper magazine. Search results will also include data from free sites like Find A Grave <findagrave.com>.
Calvin Dimmitt obituary, January 1917, Kansas City Star, GenealogyBank.com
AMERICAN ANCESTORS <americanancestors.org>
Operated by the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), this site is a treasure if you have New England ancestors.
Included in your annual subscription is:
• access to early American newspapers
• discounts on research services
• American Ancestors magazine subscription
• Massachusetts vital records
• New England journals
• three thousand online databases
The site has some free databases as well, such as New York Wills, 1626–1836. To access the free databases, you’ll need to register with NEHGS (registration is free).
GENEALOGY TODAY <genealogytoday.com>
Genealogy Today is a lesser-known subscription site that specializes in an eclectic collection of family history records. Not sure if this is a subscription would be beneficial for your research? You can conduct a free search of the indexes first and see if the site contains data relevant to your family.
THE ORIGINS NETWORK <www.origins.net>
This is a favorite site for searching your British or Irish ancestry. Search for free, but you’ll have to join to view the records. Holdings include birth, death, marriage, and other records, some dating back to the 1400s.
If you’re hot on the trail of UK ancestors, check out the three-day membership trial. Even if you can’t review and print everything you need in seventy-two-hours, this will give you plenty of time to decide on the value of a monthly or annual plan.
ONE GREAT FAMILY <onegreatfamily.com>
This site is like the world’s largest family tree, built with input from genealogists like you. Take the seven-day free trial and see if you can grow your tree. One Great Family automatically searches for new data that fits into your tree, and notifies you when finds are made.
Members come from 170 countries, and the database contains 190 million unique entries.
ARCHIVES <archives.com>
Archives contains more than 1.2 billion genealogical records, including more than 100 million newspaper pages. This subscription site offers a seven-day free trial period, with an annual subscription rate of $39.95. In addition to accessing online data, you can also order (for an additional fee) on-site searches at county courthouses.
Search results across all records, Archives.com
Archives’ databases span most areas of interest to genealogists:
• vital records
• living people search
• newspapers
• obituaries
• cemetery listings
• census
• military
• immigration
• surname histories
• public records
A search across all records (verses a specific record type) will return a results page indicating how many hits were found in each type of record.
If you don’t know much about the origin of your surname, you’ll enjoy reading the Surname History. This includes the country of origin, Americanized spelling, and the number of people with this surname found in databases, i.e., “10 Dearings in immigration records.” History will also show you a map of the surname distribution in the United States, as well as variant spellings.
FINDMYPAST <findmypast.co.uk>
With more than 750 million UK records, and more added monthly, FindMyPast is a valuable database for researching your English heritage.
You can begin with a fourteen-day free trial with a search of indexed birth records from 1837–2006, marriage records from 1835–2005, and millions of parish records (baptisms, marriages, burials). You’ll also find military records spanning 1656–1994. Can’t find your ancestors in U.S. immigration records? It’s possible they’re here in the passenger lists of people leaving the UK from 1890–1960.
Among the holdings here are “UK Specialist Records”; these are small collections with information you’re not likely to find elsewhere. Gems include an 1896 list of clergy, an 1858 medical directory for Ireland, and indexes to 30,000 lists of crew members on board vessels, 1861–1913.
Want an online family tree that you can access from any location? You can create multiple trees (for free) at FindMyPast from scratch or by uploading a GEDCOM file. Users can also store up to 200MB of images and other media along with their online family trees.
FREE DATABASES
The following websites allow you to search their databases and the view results for no charge.
FamilySearch <familysearch.org>
Probably the best known—and largest—of the free sites, FamilySearch has more than one billion names in its databases. Thanks to volunteer efforts, new data is being added on a regular basis.
See chapter fourteen for real-life examples of what you can find at FamilySearch.org
THE DATABASES
You can search across all FamilySearch databases or filter by geographic region, date, and local place. Collections range from state and international censuses to birth record images, probate, Civil War, death, marriage, and migration. Some collections are indexes; others contain images of original records.
If an image is available, you’ll see a thumbnail on the left side of the information about the individual. Click the thumbnail to view, print, or save the image. There’s even an option to invert the image (from black on white to white on black) if it’s of poor quality.
Search across all databases, FamilySearch.org
FAMILYSEARCH RESEARCH WIKI <wiki.familysearch.org/en/Browse_by_Country>
What do you do when you find ancestors from a country across the globe or a research problem concerning an unfamiliar topic? Turn to the FamilySearch Research Wiki. Here you’ll find research articles written by experts, and you have the ability to add your own expertise, just like you can at Wikipedia. Some topics have a robust amount of information available, while others have a slim amount.
Search results with image, FamilySearch.org
FAMILYSEARCH CATALOG <familysearch.org>
If a genealogical record has been microfilmed, it’s probably part of the FamilySearch collections at the Family History Library. For a nominal fee, you can order a microfilm or microfiche through your local FamilySearch Center (FSC) and have it delivered to the FSC for your review.
Use the online catalog for preliminary research into what’s available. You can search holdings by surname, place, title, author, subject, call number of film/fiche number, or keywords (beta).
The surname search will tell you if anyone has written a book about your family. Use the place search to see the records available for a specific location. For example, a search for San Diego, California, shows there are more than seventy items, including fifteen on only San Diego history.
Click any entry for availability in either microfilm or fiche. Once you find a film/fiche of interest, copy down the name and call number, then place your order through a FamilySearch Center. It typically takes about two weeks for films to arrive. Unfortunately, books aren’t available for loan.
Place search, FamilySearch Library catalog
FAMILYSEARCH LEARNING CENTER <familysearch.org/learn/researchcourses>
Click the Learn link at the top of the home page to see the free genealogy courses offered online. Courses are presented in video format and include a PDF handout or course outline. Online courses are excellent, especially if you’re just getting started in researching foreign countries.
Take online courses and tutorials at FamilySearch.org
RootsWeb <rootsweb.com>
RootsWeb is the oldest free genealogy community on the internet. With more than eight million user-donated records, you will probably find at least one ancestor here.
Although funded by Ancestry.com, RootsWeb has maintained its own identity, maintaining ongoing projects like the 600-million name WorldConnect Project, message boards, and thousands of mailing lists.
If you want to connect with other surname researchers, get on a RootsWeb mailing list. Lists abound for almost every surname and genealogical topic imaginable. When you opt in to the list, you’ll get the choice to receive a digest (compilation) of e-mail messages that come into the list or receive each e-mail as it is sent to the list. Mailing lists and message boards offer the opportunity of presenting your brick wall problems to other researchers and hopefully getting some help.
Don’t overlook all of the other offerings on this site. A favorite is the U.S. Town/County Database that you can use to quickly look up the county in which a town is located. Or search the Archives for data in a collection that’s been growing for more than ten years.
USGenWeb <usgenweb.com>
Established in 1996, USGenWeb is a conglomeration of thousands of websites that are maintained by volunteers. Because this is an all-volunteer organization, the look, feel, and content of each site within the project varies depending on the efforts of the site’s coordinator.
Some sites are robust, brimming with databases, biographies, county histories, maps, and transcriptions of church, census, and cemetery records. Others are barebones, providing little more than surname queries and links to the county courthouse, library, and other repositories.
You also may find broken links as you surf the project due to a massive data transfer the project undertook when it moved from its original RootsWeb host to other hosts in 2000. If you encounter a broken link on a USGenWeb site, contact the site’s coordinator.
On the left side of the USGenWeb Home page, you’ll see an alphabetical list of the fifty states, plus the District of Columbia and Oklahoma/Indian Territory. Click on any of the states to go to that state’s home page.
USGenWeb’s structure mimics the way genealogists research national-, state-, and county-level records, meaning the most emphasis is placed on local, that is county-level, records. So each USGenWeb state site will prominently feature links to county sites. The key to successfully using USGenWeb is knowing the names of the counties your ancestors lived in. The case study at the end of this chapter will help you find this information if you don’t have it.
Select a county at the home page of the Massachusetts GenWeb
Almost all records, from tax to property to birth to marriage to death, are kept on the county level, not the state or federal level. You’ll also find church, school, social, and newspaper records on the county level.
Again, because the sites are run by volunteers, there’s no uniform formula for site content and presentation. But almost all county sites include county formation dates and the names of parent counties from which each was formed, along with other historical background and possibly photos. You’ll also find the name and e-mail address of the county coordinator. Counties without coordinators will be indicated as needing “adoption.”
You’ll probably find:
• a site search engine. For counties with hundreds or even dozens of pages, it’s quicker to use the county search engine than go through each set of documents individually. The search engine will query all the record transcriptions for the county, such as newspaper articles and Bible, census, school, and military records.
• names of volunteers who’ll do lookups. These volunteers may own county histories or published indexes of local records (census, cemeteries, tax lists), or live near repositories or cemeteries. Look for rules on how to request a lookup.
• surname queries. You can post your own query and read queries from other researchers. Note that contact information on these pages is frequently out-of-date, but it’s still worth perusing and posting.
• links to research techniques for other sites.
• links to local repositories and genealogy organizations.
In addition to the States links, the USGenWeb had a number of other helpful links on its Home page:
PROJECTS: The link to special projects is located both on the top menu and the right side of the Home page. One of the projects, for example, focuses on transcribing tombstones across the country. For researchers who live hundreds of miles from a cemetery, being able to track down a burial online is a real time-saver.
Other projects transcribe obituary, census, pension, and marriage records. Explore this link for a list of current projects, along with a link to each.
RESEARCHERS: Also located on the top of the home page is a Researchers link. Click it and you’ll land on a page with a hodgepodge of helpful information on topics such as land records, naming conventions, immigration, the census, and more. (Note that on some pages this link is called Research Home.)
PROJECT ARCHIVES: The USGenWeb Archives house thousands of transcriptions of historical documents such as obituaries, biographical sketches, wills, cemeteries, and county histories that volunteers have uploaded to a state or county site. This link lets you search the archives either nationally or by state (or by county, from county sites).
The Project Archives also includes a Special Project section that includes links for Census Images, the Marriages Project, the Maps Project, Newsletter, the Obits Project, the Pensions Project, the Special Collections Project, and Court Cases.
Note that you generally won’t see digitized records, so use the transcribed information to track down the original record.
SITE NAVIGATION: This easy-to-miss pull-down menu near the top of the Home page has links to several pages that you’d probably never otherwise find, including brochures you can print for free distribution to your genealogy society, a PowerPoint presentation about USGenWeb, and how to write queries. This menu also has quick links to the pages described under the Projects link.
WorldGenWeb <worldgenweb.org>
If your ancestor search leads you outside the United States, surf the WorldGenWeb. It’s structured like the USGenWeb, except for its country-specific divisions (states, counties, regions) rather than state and county.
Although some of the pages have scant information, you will find valuable contact information for the region. This is particularly important when it comes to requesting official records.
Several of the WorldGenWeb sites also have research tips. For example, the Caribbean pages have information on religions in the area by nationality and immigration lists. You’ll also learn about “stock books,” the local version of slave and indentured servant inventories.
HeritageQuestOnline <heritagequestonline.com>
HeritageQuestOnline is only accessible through public libraries that have a subscription. If your local library has a subscription, you can access the website’s six outstanding databases:
• the complete set of federal census records, 1790–1930
• PERSI (Periodical Source Index), a compilation of more than two million articles from genealogy magazines
• Revolutionary War pension and bounty land warrant applications
• Freedman’s Bank, an excellent source for information on African-American ancestors
• 28,000 family history books
• U.S. Serial Set, a database of legal documents
Check with your local library to see if it subscribes to HeritageQuestOnline.
Geni <geni.com>
With unlimited, free online space, you can upload your GEDCOM files, photos, videos, and other documents, then share them with other family members or researchers. If you find another tree that relates to your own, you can request permission to collaborate with the tree owner.
Using Geni, you can find connections with other genealogists, as well as become part of the Big Tree—Geni’s attempt to create one family tree for the entire world. The Big Tree is built from the collaborative research of millions of genealogists; to date it has connected 57 million profiles.
If you want to boost your chances of finding another person researching your family tree, Geni is a great place to begin.
WeRelate <werelate.org>
With pages on more than 2 million people and families, WeRelate is the largest genealogy wiki—and it’s geared primarily toward sharing family tree data. The goal is to encourage people to post their research on specific ancestors for others to find and add to, so everyone benefits from the collaboration.
To get started, sign up for a free account, then either upload a GEDCOM file or begin entering your family tree manually.
After WeRelate creates your pages (this can take up to an hour for large files), you can view your relatives on stand-alone pages, within a pedigree chart, in a timeline, and even on a map.
The site has several excellent video tutorials, each of which walks you through a specific task, such as how to create or edit a family page. Before beginning your wiki expedition, I recommend you watch the “helicopter ride” video (eight minutes), which gives a good overview of how the system works.
GOVERNMENT SITES
Library of Congress <loc.gov>
You can easily spend a day just surfing through the Library of Congress website. Known as America’s Library, the Library of Congress was built by Congress in 1800. After the original collection was destroyed by the British during the War of 1812, Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library to the LOC in 1815.
Among the collections are
• sound recordings
• historic newspapers
• photographs
• maps
• manuscripts
Click on any of these “favorite” collections from the home page to search the collection. For example, the digitized newspaper collection ranges from 1836 to 1922 and can be searched by keyword. The Advanced Search allows filtering by state, date, and newspaper name.
Historic newspaper search, Library of Congress
The Maps Collection is extraordinary, whether you’re searching for an historic river route down the Ohio or particulars of a Civil War battle.
Use the on-site search engine to locate specific collections or items in a collection. For example, a simple search for genealogy turned up more than 2,400 listings, including a digitized version of a book written in 1879. This volume is a record of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who were the first settlers in the “Forks of Delaware.”
Click the link to researchers <loc.gov/rr> to find links to all of the digital collections <loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html>. Keep in mind that each of the major collections can have several other subcollections within them—so there’s much more to search than initially meets the eye.
My favorites? Prints & Photographs and American Memory.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) <archives.gov/research/genealogy/index.html>
Although many genealogists will never travel to the National Archives, they can visit virtually via the Archives’ website. Among the many resources for genealogists are how-to articles, tips on getting started in research, and a section of preserving and storing old photographs.
As the Archives website notes, the focus isn’t on providing online data, but rather “on providing research tools, such as microfilm indexes, as well as resources, such as finding aids, articles and information on where to find the records and how to access them, and how to conduct in-person research.”
Among those tools are the Access to Archival Databases (AAD) and the Archival Research Catalog (ARC).
The AAD <aad.archives.gov/aad/> is a search engine for 85 million historic electronic records, a tiny fraction of the 10 billion electronic records held by the NARA. You can do a free-text search, or browse by category or subject. One of them might be of great interest to you if your ancestor came to America during the Irish potato famine. It’s a list of Famine Irish Passenger Record Data File (FIPAS), 1/12/1846–12/31/1851. While you won’t find an image of a passenger list, you can see the port of embarkation, manifest number, and arrival date in the United States.
The ARC is the online catalog of all of NARA’s holdings, both in Washington, D.C., and the Regional Archives. You can search by keyword, topic, people, and location. A handy filter is the tab that allows a search only of digitized records.
An interesting find, while searching for Tennessee military was Congressman Davy Crockett’s Resolution to Abolish the Military Academy at West Point, 02/25/1830. Another was Robert E. Lee’s demand for John Brown’s surrender at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
Some of the more popular findings here are records that relate to Native Americans, including The Final Rolls of Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory, 03/04/1907.
CASE STUDY
FINDING ANCESTORS AT THE USGENWEB
The goal of this search is to learn more about Martin Hendrickson and John Hendrickson when they lived in Kansas. What’s known is that both of them lived in Lincoln, Kansas, at an unknown period of time after the Civil War.
STEP 1. I didn’t know which county Lincoln, Kansas, was located in, so I used the U.S. Town/County Database at RootsWeb <resources.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/townco.cgi>. Lincoln, Kansas, is located in Lincoln County.
Select a county for research using the county map, Kansas GenWeb
STEP 2. On the USGenWeb Home page <usgenweb.com>, I clicked the link for the Kansas page. The Kansas state page gives you the choice of selecting a specific county on a list or on a map.
I chose the map option and was able to find and select Lincoln County.
STEP 3. From the Lincoln County Home page, I had the choice of searching the entire Lincoln County site using their on-site search engine, or I could browse through the many sections of the site.
Use the on-site search engine to search all of the pages at the Lincoln County, Kansas GenWeb
A third choice was to check out the forty links to different Kansas genealogy sites. These include links to:
• online census
• Kansas pioneers
• World War II Kansans
• old maps
• Korean War casualties
• Kansas in the Civil War
• index of an 1895 Kansas state census
List of Lincoln County, Kansas, genealogy resources
My first choice was to use the search box. Doing a simple search for John Hendrickson and then Martin Hendrickson returned numerous hits, including personal recollections, newspaper articles, and a county history.
In reading through the hits, it was apparent that there was more than one John Hendrickson in the same place and same time period.
However, one of the mentions in the recollection section of the newspaper was about a John Hendrickson who was in Lincoln with his son-in-law, Mike Keller. I knew from previous research that Mike had married Martha Hendrickson, John’s daughter. So this was my John.
So, more information about John than I had known before, including:
In the spring of [18]sixty-eight we were joined by others among them was John Hendrickson and his son in-law by the name Mike Keller. Mike settled east of where the Rees mill now stands, about eighty rods east on the south side of the creek and John Hendrickson’s claim joined what is now Lincoln Center on the southwest corner. He built his house near where the Alva Wilson house now stands. In August of the same year he and his son in- law had quite a scrap with the Indians. I never did know if they killed any Indians, but they had two of their blankets so they decided they had enough of the west and went back to Missouri that fall and never got back to Kansas only on a visit.
Not only do I have the year of John’s arrival in Lincoln, I also have a location where the home stood and the fact that John left Lincoln that same fall. This means taking my research back to an 1870 Missouri census.
What else can I find?
STEP 4. I explored other links on the site and found a photo of the Rees Mill (near where Mike Keller lived) <freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lincolncounty/mill1.jpg> and a link to other Lincoln families who have websites <http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/lincoln/dirfamily.htm>. This is quite a find because at least one of them is connected to the family I’m searching. Most valuable, perhaps, is a Lincoln County Research Guide that details how to find vital records, cemetery and church records, and obituaries.
Is there more to find at the USGenWeb?
STEP 5. Why not check the archives for John? This time, we’ll go to the USGenWeb Home page and click Project Archives, then National Search Engine. To search all states at once, click the link to Search all of U.S. <usgwarchives.net/search/searcharchives.html>. Otherwise, click on the link for your state of interest. I picked Missouri and did a search for John Hendrickson.
This was pretty much a bust.
STEP 6. How about census images? I also searched the USGenWeb archives for county-level indexes of U.S. census records. (Some USGenWeb pages even have digitized images of the census itself.)
To search through the Census Project, go to the main Census Project page <usgwarchives.net/census> and click your state, then the county. Beneath it, you’ll see the available census year(s). Another bust for me, as neither my Kansas nor my Missouri counties were listed. But you may have better luck.