I have a confession to make; I have been using Internet Archive for several years. However, I never realized how much I didn’t know about the site and all of the fabulous resources it contains because I never went beyond my comfort zone. After Saturday’s talk by Debra Dudek, I am excited to explore this absolutely free website full of genealogical goodies!
Debra’s presentation on Internet Archive – The Amazing Genealogical Resource You’re Not Using! showed us that we may be overlooking a site that could very well hold the answer to solving our genealogical brick walls. What is Internet Archive? It is a non-profit, free online library with out-of-copyright items, digital materials, audio files, images, and older websites that are no longer available. Why is this important to genealogists? Let’s say you are trying to trace an individual in your family tree, but you’ve hit a brick wall because the information you need is hidden behind a pay wall. Before paying for a subscription, dive into Internet Archive to see if you can locate what you need for free.
What types of resources can you find at Internet Archive? City and rural directories, gazetteers, year books, county histories, family histories, voter registrations, maps, religious records, tax lists, military service records, historical papers, and vital records just to name a few. There are also still- and moving-images and other types of media. After you set up your free account, you can browse through the entire repository and begin building your own group of resources.
Now that I know more about the variety of resources available to me on this site, I intent to branch out from my aforementioned “comfort zone” and set up my free account. I am eager to delve into new areas of research such as county histories, plat maps, farm directories, and tax lists to follow the trail of my ancestors as they moved across the country toward California.
Here’s a challenge for all of us. Come December, when we have our member Show & Tell, let us know what new and exciting information you found while searching through the storehouse of genealogical information that is Internet Archive.
Happy searching!