Other Resources
New resources are added to the Books We Own regularly, 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.
- University of Calgary Digital Library - 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).
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 (in early 2024, Rootsweb sites will be converted to read-only. Unless the site is migrated, information will remain accessible but will not be updated.)
- 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."