GenealogyBank.com

America's GenealogyBank provides subscription access to historical and genealogical records in the United States from the 17th to the 21st century. Digitized resources include genealogies, obituaries, marriage notices, local histories, casualty lists and other documents of genealogical interest. GenealogyBank offers access to many historical documents that aren't available elsewhere online, making it a valuable genealogy tool for the serious genealogist.

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NewsBank has brought together a wealth of genealogical data from various resources and offers it to individual subscribers at GenealogyBank.com. The content, much of it unique online to GenealogyBank, includes over 2,400 historical newspapers from 1690-1977; more than 26.9 million obituaries from 1977 to the present; over 11,700 books, pamplets and printed items from 1652-1900; the complete American State Papers (1789-1838) and all genealogical content from the US Serial Set (1817-1930). They also offer the US Social Security Death Index (available elsewhere online for free), but have taken the extra step of including the estimated age at death and the day of the week for birth and death, and update it weekly.

Overall search was excellent, although it turned up a lot of extraneous hits in the historical newspapers section - most likely due to the unusual typefaces used in the old newspapers. A search for the surname KOTH, for example, turns up hits for Roth, both, notice and other irrelevant words. Definitely use the advanced search to narrow the results by location and date!

Image download times were excellent and I really liked the easy scanning offered by the built-in viewer. Newspaper articles and other digitized documents can be saved to your computer as PDF files, but not as an images. Overall, however, GenealogyBank gets an A for ease of navigation and use.

GenealogyBank is an excellent resource, especially for early Colonial research and for genealogists ready to venture beyond the basic marriage certificate and census records. I conduct historical research through a number of Web sites, but GenealogyBank is always my first stop.