History and genealogy books, periodicals, and more from home

This is not a list of all the websites that offer digitized books and periodicals for us, but is a list that will get you started from the comfort of your own home. This list of free websites is abstracted from my oft-requested presentation Your Anytime Library: Success in the Virtual Stacks. We can do a lot of U.S. historical and genealogical research from our home.

Do some searching by various terms: surname, city, county, state, occupation, laws, vital records, bibles, and other keyword terminology. I will add another post soon about some websites that lead you to both free and fee-based websites.

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Internet Archive
HathiTrust Digital Library
Google Books
Digital Public Library of America
FamilySearch Digital Library
JSTOR (Journal Storage)

Subscription based genealogy databases have some free material as do many genealogical societies. Many public, college, and university libraries and special collection departments have digitized books. County and state historical societies often have digital collections. Worldcat.org is what I call a library catalog of library catalogs and it’s easy to set a parameter to search for books and other items that are available online.

There’s no reason to be bored with all the research that we can do right now from our homes as we wait for our libraries, historical societies, and archives to reopen.

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2 comments on “History and genealogy books, periodicals, and more from home”

Thank you for posting this information. I’ve used all of the repositories you mention.

That said, one of the features that I truly appreciate WorldCat and Hathi Trust, is a feature that allows you to create your own virtual library shelf’. That is, set up various shelves that you can store the books and get back to them later. I’ve found that feature to be extremely helpful. My public library (Seattle and King Co.) also allow you to create just that kind of shelf, but they call them LISTS.

Also, the other place that I recently discovered is http://www.issuu.com. Some of the archives, universities, and specialty associations are now using this to upload and profile both books and publications. One that I really like is Pacific Lutheran University: https://issuu.com/plu-archives