Website Review & How To: Archives.com
VIDEO & SHOW NOTES: Learn how Archives.com can help you find your family history. We cover getting started, finding records, building your family tree and answer the question as to whether you should use it if you already use another genealogy website.
Why Use Archives.com?
If you’re new to genealogy, returning after taking a break, or just need a new place to search, Archives.com has a lot to offer. I’m going to show you how to get started with this affordable website packed with genealogical records.
The folks at Archives.com asked me to make a video sharing what I think about their website, so full disclosure, they are sponsoring this video. However, they have no clue what I’m going to say. For the past 17 years that I’ve been podcasting and just shy of that I’ve been publishing videos at the Genealogy Gems YouTube channel, I’ve always given you my honest opinion and shared my best strategies. So let’s get started and do that right now as I answer some of the most common questions about Archives.com.
What Makes Archives.com Unique?
Like many other genealogy websites, it has billions of genealogy records. However, the subscription is a fraction of the cost of other big name websites. That makes it ideal for beginners, or if you just need a new place to dig for records in addition to your other subscriptions. Start with a free 7-day trial to find out what Archives can do for your genealogy research.
What Does Archives.com Offer?
The main focus of the website is searching for genealogical records. And they have billions of the most popular.
Archive.com is owned by Ancestry, and according to the folks at Archives there is some overlap, just like there would be with other genealogy records sites. But Archives does include records you won’t find on Ancestry, and there are records on Ancestry that are not on Archives. Since Archives is much less expensive, it’s worth a look.
What Record Collections are Included?
The easiest way to find out if Archives.com has the record collections you want is to go to the Collections page at https://www.archives.com/collections or click Collections in the menu.
They currently have 650 record collections that include billions of individual records.
Use the filters on the Collections page to browse by Keywords, Record Type or Country. Click the down arrow on the Record Type filter to get a quick overview of the types of records the site focuses on.
In addition to some of the traditional types of records like birth, marriage, death, census and immigration, you’ll find some special collections such as Memory Pages, Surname Histories, and City Directories.
If you’re trying to find ancestors in the “old country”, check the Countries filter list before you start searching. No point in looking for records for a country that they don’t have.
How to Search for Records at Archives.com
In genealogy, we start with ourselves and work backwards. Your grandparents are a great place to start searching. When searching for records, I recommend that you start with a particular ancestor in mind and fill in as many details as you can about them before you move further back in your family tree.
There are three different ways to start searching:
- Use the search fields at the top of the home page.
- Click the Advanced Search link to go to a more robust search page.
- Or click SEARCH in the menu which also takes you to the Advanced Search page.
I recommend going straight to the Advanced Search page. This way you can cut out the results that don’t match and zero in on the time frame and also the type of records you want to find.
In searching for genealogy records it’s important to balance searching narrowly enough to get to what you want while searching broadly enough not to miss something.
When searching for less common names, try just searching on the name without clicking the Exact match box. This will keep your results fairly broad and provide an opportunity to see how many and what kind of results you get. By not narrowing the scope of the search, you’re less likely to miss a record that has a slight name deviation.
Take a moment to quickly scroll down and see how many are close matches. Chances are it’s just a fraction of the total results. In my case, there were only about 9 close results out of over 40,000.
If the name you are searching is fairly common, then adding a location and life events with dates can help differentiate people and results.
A Beginner’s Basic Guide
Archives Record filters are in the general order that you need for genealogy:
- Gather Death, Marriage and Birth records first.
- Fill in with Census Records throughout your ancestors’ lifetime.
- Military Service and Immigration Records are also really important milestones to find.
- Fill in even more like City and Telephone Directories which were often published yearly.
- Check out Family Trees that might include your ancestor, and Media records that can further fill in their story.
Can You Build a Family Tree?
Yes! Archives.com includes a family tree builder users can attach their records to and a discovery engine that helps users find new records about their ancestors. Start with your parents or grandparents.
You can search other people’s family trees from the Advanced Search page. You can also create your own tree. Archive’s provides a nice, simple user interface to build out a family tree online.
I just want to say that in my opinion, the very best place to build your family tree is in genealogy database software that you use on your own computer. That way you always have control of it no matter how long you have a subscription to any website. But if you’re just getting started, this is a great way to get your feet wet
If you’ve already created your tree on your own computer, then you can export it as a GEDCOM. That is the universal file type for genealogy family trees specifically. You can then upload that file to Archives.com and work with it from there.
My online family trees are not what I call my ‘master family tree’. That is on my computer. So why do I create an online tree? The reason is simple. It’s a great way to generate Discoveries and connections. I use it to generate clues and record hints.
Archives.com makes it easy to create a family tree. Start with yourself, add your parents, and what you know about your grandparents, and you are off to the races! Or, as I mentioned before, you can upload an existing GEDCOM file.
Learn more about GEDCOMS with this video: All About GEDCOMS.
As soon as you set up your tree on Archives and start looking at records, you will start generating Discoveries automatically. It’s a way to speed up the research process and make genealogy easier than it’s ever been before.
Resources:
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German Place Names: Find Your Ancestors’ Hometown with This Free Online Tool
German place names have changed dramatically over time, so it can be challenging to identify your German ancestors’ place of origin. This free online tool helps family historians navigate changes in German place names, jurisdictions, and boundaries. Thank you to...Find Your Ancestors in Freedmen’s Bureau Records–or Help Others Do the Same
The more I learn about U.S. history and records, the more I appreciate the challenges faced by those researching their African-American roots. In addition to the emotional toll of learning about their ancestors’ hardships, today’s researchers face the practical challenges of finding kin in records that mostly ignored their existence.
That’s why I’m super excited that the Freedmen’s Bureau records are finally being fully indexed. Scattered records are already transcribed (see the Freedmen’s Bureau Online). But there hasn’t been a comprehensive index of its 1.5 million state field agency documents. These include military pensions, marriage records, property claims, hospital records, trial summaries, labor contracts, school rolls, registers and censuses. Many of the four million African-Americans freed from slavery are mentioned, as are many white Southerners.
FamilySearch indexers began quietly indexing Freedmen’s Bureau records in 2009: the state of Virginia’s records are already searchable. Last week, in observance of the Juneteenth holiday (which celebrates emancipation), FamilySearch issued a call to action. They asked for help indexing the rest of the Freedmen’s Bureau within the year.
“Records, histories and stories will be available on DiscoverFreedmen.org,” says a release. “Additionally, the records will be showcased in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is currently under construction on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and expected to open in late 2016.”
Here’s a quick history lesson: The Freedmen’s Bureau was organized after the Civil War to aid newly-freed slaves in 15 states and Washington, DC. For several years it gathered “handwritten, personal information on freed men, women and children, including marriage and family information, military service, banking, school, hospital and property records,” according to FamilySearch.
The richest genealogical records of the Freedmen’s Bureau are in the field office records of each state. Click here to download a PDF from the National Archives about these original records.
Find more tips on finding African-American and other Southern U.S. ancestors here on the Genealogy Gems website. Recent posts include:
- Missing Birth Record? Here’s What You Can Do To Track It Down (example from Tupelo, MS)
- The 1910 Census in Puerto Rico: A Surprising Record on Using Census Records for Genealogy (on understanding race in the census)
- Free Civil War Veterans Database: Soldiers and Sailors (on African-American sailors in the Civil War)
Receive a heads-up about posts like these–and get a free e-book on Google searching for genealogy–when you subscribe to the free Genealogy Gems newsletter in the upper right corner of this webpage or our home page.
5 Genealogy Search Hacks (Premium Exclusive)
Elevenses with Lisa LIVE show exclusively for Premium Members. These 5 search hacks are going to move you into the category of genealogy search ninja! Premium Members can join me for the live show and join in the chat. Or watch the video replay afterward at your convenience.
Watch the Video Replay
Show Notes
Download the show notes handout. The first page can be printed separately as a one-page cheat sheet.
1. Quickly find free stuff on the big genealogy websites
You probably have a subscription to one or more of the big genealogy websites like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, Findmypast.com or Fold3.com. The fastest way to find out what’s new at these websites is to visit these specific pages, and bookmark them on your web browser.
FamilySearch (free): https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list
Click “Last Updated” to sort all the collections starting with the most recently updated. Use the filters to narrow down to only the types of collections you’re interested in (record type, location date or any combination.)
Bookmark webpages on your web browser bar:
- Right-click on the browser bar and select Add Folder.
- Name the folder something like Gen Sites.
- Navigate to the first website.
- In the browser bar, click the icon and URL.
- Drag and drop it on to a blank area of the browser bar.
- Continue to go to websites and add them to the folder.
- Right-click on any item in the folder or on the browser bookmark bar you want to delete or rename. (It can be helpful to shorten the site names.)
- When you want to check a site, simply click the folder and click the website.
Ancestry.com: https://www.ancestry.com/cs/recent-collections
Ancestry’s Recently Added and Updated Collections on Ancestry page does a nice job of differentiating between New and Update. Since collections may be regularly updated, it’s nice to spot the ones that are brand new.
The dropdown menu at the top of the page is set to United States by default. However, you can use it to view the new content for other countries as well.
Free Collections at Ancestry: https://www.ancestry.com/search/categories/freeindexacom/
Findmypast: https://www.findmypast.com/blog/new
Findmypast is primarily focused on records from the United Kingdom, although they do have some records from other countries including the United States. While they do have a “What’s New?” page, it’s not a list directly from their catalog. Instead, it’s a compilation of their weekly Friday blog post on new and updated records starting with the most recently published. This means you’d have to click through and read each post. Here’s a search hack to work around this.
- Go to Google.com.
- Type in the keyword(s) for what you want, followed by a space.
- Next, Type site: and paste the page’s URL (https://www.findmypast.com/blog/new)
- Here’s what your search will look like:
- “derbyshire advertiser” newspaper site:https://www.findmypast.com/blog/new
- On the results page, click Tools. A filter menu will pop up. Click the Any Time drop-down and select the desired timeframe such as the past month or past year, or a custom range of 2020 through 2023.
- Press Enter on your keyboard and your results will narrow down only to matching results from that timeframe.
Fold3: https://www.fold3.com/search
This website, owned by Ancestry, has a primary focus on military records, although you will find other records as well.
You can find the most recent content additions by going to the search page and selecting a country and other descriptions of types of records that interest you. Then on the results page, click the Sort: Relevance button and select Sort: Newest First. You can narrow the list down further by clicking the Any Time button and selecting increments up to the last year.
2. How to Search a Specific Website
Use site search to dig into websites:
- that don’t have a search feature,
- that have a search feature that’s not great,
- or to double-check that you found everything at that site.
Essentially, you can use Google search as a custom search engine for a specific website.
For example, USGenWeb is a free genealogy website that has been around for a long time and has a vast number of pages and content. There isn’t a search box on the home page, but you can click Search & Site Map in the menu. However, you’ll notice that their search engine is powered by a third party called FreeFind which has been around since 1998. Because it’s free and a third party, the search field is definitely not secure. Since that’s the case, you might as well use the largest and most powerful search engine in the world, Google, to search to run your search instead. Google’s site search is the way to do that.
A note about websites like USGenWeb: Make sure that you are searching the correct website.
Notice the URL for the USGenWeb website: https://usgenweb.org/index.html. Click the desired state on the map on the home page. Now, look at the URL again.
Example: Indiana http://ingenweb.org/
Notice that it’s actually a different website. Each state has the two-letter state abbreviation at the beginning of the URL. Use the state address when conducting a site search.
Example Search: If I wanted to find all mentions of a surname in the state, my site search would look like this:
Hulse site:http://ingenweb.org/
You can use the Google search operators listed in my book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox to be even more specific about what you want to find.
3. How to Search Websites from within RootsMagic
As genealogists, we spend a lot of time in our genealogy software programs. The one I use, and it’s one of the most popular, is RootsMagic. So, it would be really convenient to be able to run searches at genealogy websites where I have a subscription, or in search engines like Google which will scour the entire internet. Well, you can so let me show you how to do that in RootsMagic.
- Select the individual you want to research.
- Click SEARCH in the menu.
- Click the WebSearch
- Edit the person as needed.
- To select which websites to search, click the Provider
- Check the box “show results in external web browser” for more flexibility and to get the URL for Web Tags (which you can add on the Person profile page.)
The main part of the WebSearch screen is a web browser window that displays your results.
The left and right arrows at the top of the page display allowing you to go back and forth between web pages.
Add WebTag adds a link to the current website to the card of the person on whom you’re searching. To open your results in your regular web browser instead, click the Use External Browser checkbox. (Note that this disables the Add WebTag button.)
For websites that require logging in (such as FamilySearch, Ancestry and Findmypast) the initial result will be a log in page on the website. Once you log in, the search results should appear.
How to Manage Search Providers in RootsMagic
You can add and edit providers.
- Click SEARCH in the menu.
- Click Edit Providers (at the bottom of the search box, above the list of people.)
- Under the Standard Search Providers you’ll see not just genealogy websites, but also search engines like Google and Bing.
- Click the Custom Search Providers
- Click the Add
- Type in the name of the provider.
- In your web browser, go to the provider’s home page.
- Use the search engine to search for John Doe 1700-1800.
- Copy the URL (Ctrl + C) of the search results page.
- Paste the URL (Ctrl + V) into the Search Results URL field in RootsMagic.
- Click the OK button which will close the box.
- You will now find the provider you just added at the bottom of the Provider list.
- If there are any providers listed that you don’t want to show up in the list of providers, uncheck the box for that provider in Manage Search Providers.
Tips:
- You can always resize your windows to fit side by side.
- Right-click links in RootsMagic to open in a new browser tab at any time.
- If you want searches to be conducted immediately without editing the person’s information, check the box for AutoSearch.
- Click PEOPLE in the menu to return to that person’s profile in your tree.
4. Browsing Offline Websites
In order for Google to be able to deliver websites as search results, it has to visit them. It has bots that “crawl” the website. When it does, it keeps a copy known as a cached version. Google keeps cached version of all websites.
Occasionally websites are down, or they go offline temporarily for a variety of reasons. This search trick will give you a way to browse the website until it comes back online.
The Cache: search operator can be used in the Google search field followed by the URL of the webpage you are trying to access. Here’s an example of a search query that will let you browse the Genealogy Gems website if we are temporarily offline:
Cache:https://lisalouisecooke.com
It’s slow for browsing a website because you need to run a cache search for each page. But it’s great if you already have the link (such as a link to a video and show notes in our newsletter – just right-click on the red button and copy the link). It’s very handy if a link you have is broken and you want to see it again and perhaps try and track down a working link (as in the case where they have moved the page.)
5. How to Search with Photos and Images
How to Upload an Image to Google Image Search (Reverse Search):
- Digitize the image and save it to your computer.
- On your computer, go to https://images.google.com or google Google Images.
- Click the camera icon in the search field.
- Navigate to and select the digitized photo you saved to your computer.
- Google will attempt to find that exact image, or the closest visually. Currently, Google can identify basic elements in the photo and better-known subjects.
- Adjust the frame to crop or click dots to focus on search certain elements in the image.
- Click the Find Image Source button at the top to dig further.
How to Search an Online Photo with Google Images (Reverse Search)
- Right-click on a PC (Control-Click on a Mac) on the image on the web page.
- In the pop-up menu select Copy Image Address.
- Got to Google Images.
- Click the camera icon in the search field.
- Paste the image URL that you copied to your computer clipboard (on a PC use Control V on your keyboard.)
- Click the Search by Image button to run your search.
Learn More:
Resources
Download the show notes handout. The first page can be printed separately as a one-page cheat sheet.