Useful sites for research in United States

[cwsfam]

I don't know whether or not anyone on the forum has needed to research those who immigrated, but sometimes I have found quite useful information within the following sites. If anyone finds these useful and would like other of my best research sites, I will be glad to post them as well. New Jersey, Virginia and New York were often places new immigrants first settled. Other places include Pennsylvania, Maryland and South Carolina. South Carolina does have a nice site, but unfortunately early settlers there were lax about record keeping. The Maryland digital archive is just horrible. It's a real shame, because 5 years ago it was a lovely site--then they "fixed" it and no one can find anything. (In joke for those who follow news from United States--Must have been the same web designers hired to set up the Obamacare web site!). As for Pennsylvania, I will supply those if anyone wants.

If you had ancestral relative that was deported for political reasons or debt, you might find information in the archives of Georgia, Virginia or South Carolina primarily. Those leaving for religious reasons are more likely to be found in New York, New Jersey or Maryland . A point to remember is that the boundaries of the original colonies were quite different from the boundaries of today's states. For example, before 1760, the lands of the colony of Virginia were claimed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. In other cases, states were carved from other states or bits added by political manuever, conquest or purchase.

New Jersey digital archives:
http://slic.njstatelib.org/NJ_Informati ... ollections
also at http://tinyurl.com/njarchive

Library of Virginia
http://www.lva.virginia.gov/

free newspaper data base for United States:
http://www.freenewspaperarchives.us/
I have found copies of out of print biographies and histories here.
http://www.worldcat.org

Single lineage researcher site
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lineage/

State of New York
http://newyorkheritage.org/
http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/gallery/home.shtml
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/d/
http://library.buffalostate.edu/digitalcollections

Excellent collection of world maps

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/pcl/collections/map_room

Hope someone finds these useful!
Barbara

[cwsfam]

Some more useful links for research in the states:
Georgia

http://cdm.sos.state.ga.us/index.php
http://www.digitalstatearchives.com/georgia

Kinship calculator
http://www.searchforancestors.com/utili ... lator.html

(The Carolinas, Tennesee, Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi all swapped chunks of land back and forth until the mid 1800's. Even if a census states a person born in Georgia or Mississippi, that area might be Alabama or one of the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee today )

South carolina
http://www.sciway.net/lib/archives.html

North Carolina
http://www.archives.ncdcr.gov/projects.htm
http://genealogy.about.com/od/north_car ... online.htm


Massachusetts (this included the state of Maine and parts of several others during colonial days)

http://www.statearchives.us/massachusetts.htm


Connecticut

http://freegensites.blogspot.com/2011/0 ... ticut.html

New Jersey

http://www.nj.gov/state/darm/archives.html

Mississippi

http://mdah.state.ms.us/

Immigrants' ships

http://www.immigrantships.net/
http://immigrants.byu.edu/

Early Maps of Colonial America

http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargre ... lamer.html


List and links to good archives

http://oedb.org/library/features/250-pl ... d-archives

Internet Archive

http://archive.org/index.php

Maryland (but it's extremely hard to use.)

http://aomol.net/html/index.html

[cwsfam]

I would like to offer lookups to others from two subscriptions I have. (Three if someone needs something from ancestry.com) I have access to genealogybank.com and newspaperarchive.com and am willing to help out anyone who may need a lookup here.

Those of you familiar with ancestry.uk know what ancestry.com has. Sometimes one needs a record or document from the other site and it is not available to you unless you have a world subscription. I do offer to do specific lookups for you. I cannot research a whole family tree of course, but will relay information about what I find in a lookup.

GeneaIogybank.com has access to records from across the United States. Newspaperarchive.com is more widespread and includes several other countries. Newspaperarchive.com has newspapers and related publications of all sorts (not complete of course, but they continually add more) from 1757 for United States. Available records for the United Kingdom are from 1607 to present; Ireland from 1700-2010; Canada from 1875 to present;Germany from 1948-1999;France from 1823-1979 ; South Africa from 1904-1945; China from 1850-1926 ; Denmark from 1884-1936 and Jamaica from 1834 - present.

I do need to pass along a caution though. The website for Ancestry.com has been having a host of problems for the past six months. At any given time, something else could cease to work for a time, so patience is a useful trait.

The other two sites demand very specific information and still may or may not find what you are looking for. Most of their search parameters appear to still be based on OCR and this often produces false positives.

With all that, I do offer lookups. If you will send me as specific information as possible--name(s) dates, locations, relatives if known and appropriate to search-- I will run it through the sites above. In the case the dates are approximate please let me know. If keywords--such as sailor, prison, obituary, Irish lottery, etc--are available, I will use them. Many times a search will return hundreds of hits, when one, two or none are the correct ones, so if you can give me enough information to sift through them, that would be useful.

Please send me a private message should you wish my help, so we won't clog up the forums. If we find anything, of course we can post it for others to use as well.

[MaryA]

For anyone with New York connections, the Brooklyn City Directories are available free online. http://www.bklynlibrary.org/citydir/

[MaryA]

Explore 704,368 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/

[MaryA]

And New York Marble Cemetery Records
http://www.interment.net/data/us/ny/new ... metery.htm

[MaryA]

This site has just had a big update of New Online Birth, Marriage, and Death Record and Index Collection links, it looks so useful for USA research. http://www.theancestorhunt.com/blog