Published family and local histories offer a potential rich source of information about your personal family history. Even if a family genealogy has not been published for your ancestors, local and family histories can offer insight into the places your ancestors lived and the people they may have encountered during their lifetime. Before you head to the local library or bookstore, however, take time to explore what might be available on the Internet. Literally hundreds of thousands of genealogies, local histories and other items of genealogical interest can be search, viewed and downloaded online for free!
The BYU Family History Archive, a free collection of family histories, local histories, city directories and other genealogy books online, is the result of a partnership of three major genealogical libraries - The Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library; and FamilySearch's Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Digitized books have "every word" search capability, with search results linked to digital images of the original publication. When complete, this massive digitization effort promises to be the most comprehensive collection of city and county histories one the Web. Best of all, access will remain free!
Select "all books" to include books which allow viewing of over a million books, many out of copyright, but also others for which publishers have given Google permission to display limited book previews (which often includes the Table of Contents and Index pages, so you can easily check to see if a particular book includes information about your ancestor). The list of useful books, pamphlets, newspaper articles and ephemera that you might encounter includes many county histories and biographies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as family histories. Searching Google Books is much like searching Google - use phrases such as "powell family" and other techniques to limit your results.
HeritageQuest is a genealogical resource offered for free by many libraries across the United States and Canada. Most participating libraries even offer their patrons remote access from a home computer. The HeritageQuest book collection includes about 22,000 digitized family histories and local histories. Books are every-word searchable, or can be viewed page by page in their entirety. Downloading is limited to 50 pages, however. You generally won't be able to search HeritageQuest directly through this link - instead check with your local library to see if they offer this database and then connect through their site with your library card.
Archive.org, which many of you may know for its Wayback Machine, also hosts a rich text archive of books, articles and other texts. The biggest collection of interest to family historians, is the American Libraries collection, which includes over 300 city directories and 1000 family histories free for searching, viewing, downloading and printing. The Canadian Libraries collection also includes genealogies and local histories.
The Our Roots project bills itself as the world's largest collection of published Canadian local histories. Thousands of digital copies in French and English are available online, searchable by date, subject, author or keyword.
