On May 1st, I presented the topic “Insight into State Archives: ARCs, IRADs, ONAHRs, and Other Branches” for Legacy Family Tree Webinars and mentioned JSTOR. It wasn’t the focus of the presentation. I cover it in other presentations, but it wasn’t the main aim of this webinar and I received a couple questions about access.
This acronym JSTOR stands for Journal Storage and includes digitized scholarly journals and other publications in a variety of disciplines and now more than 13 million articles. One of the uses for the scholarly articles is the footnotes or endnotes of the articles, journal, theses, and other scholarly publications. It’s a way to pick up connection to records or book resources you may not have discovered any other way.
So much history, knowledge, and insight at our fingertips. My favorite search of JSTOR is finding scholarly articles on a variety of topics. It’s a way to learn more about history, repositories, and records. What was the reasoning for a certain law, ways to collect birth, marriage and death records, how a railroad sold land, or about migration patterns in the early 19th century? It might be an in-depth article about the 17th century ethnic groups in a state, the early Methodists in an ancestral county, or an obituary in an architectural journal for your granduncle who died in 1922.
The article you view might be from an archivist, historian, county or state historical society, other historical organization, business organization, musicians, African American historian, or biologist. How many organizations, businesses, religions, and college majors connect to your family over the decades?
JSTOR has brought together 14,000+ institutions, 2,800 academic journals, 75 disciplines, and 57 countries for millions of users “to create solutions that reduce costs, extend access, and preserve scholarship.”
Check your county, city, or university library for free access or sign up for limited but still expansive access. Home subscriptions (JPASS) are available if you aren’t able to get access via a library.
JSTOR Home Page: https://www.jstor.org/ scroll to the bottom of the page to access sections with more information
Help and ways to log in: https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/360000313328-Need-Help-Logging-in-to-JSTOR
JPASS: https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/115004675707-JPASS-Individual-Subscriptions-to-JSTOR
My webinar is Free through May 8th. Insight into State Archives: ARCs, IRADs, ONAHRs, and Other Branches via my affiliate link: https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/insight-into-state-archives-finding-records-in-regional-branches/?ref=566036
© 2026, Paula Stuart-Warren. All rights reserved.
