10 Awesome Genealogy Finds at the Internet Archive

Elevenses with Lisa Episode 43 Show Notes

Do you like finding new stuff about your family history? Well, then you’re in the right place because today that’s exactly what we’re going to do in this episode of Elevenses with Lisa

If you’re looking for new information about your family history, an important website to add to your research list is the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a free website that attempts to archive the web, and that includes online genealogy!

One of the best ways to approach your search at the Internet Archive is by focusing on a particular type of record. Here are 10 genealogy records that every genealogist needs that can be found at this free website.

Watch the Internet Archive episode:

Getting Started with the Internet Archive

You are free to search for and access records without an account, but there’s so much  more you can do with a free account. Here are just a few advantages of having an Internet Archive account:

  • Borrowing ebooks
  • Saving Favorites
  • Uploading content
  • Recommending websites to be archived.

Getting a free account is easy. Simply click on the Sign Up link in the upper right corner of the home page.

Types of Content at the Internet Archive

There’s a surprisingly wide variety of content available on the website including:

  • Video
  • Audio
  • Text
  • Images
  • Books
  • Software

10 Awesome Finds at the Internet Archive

A great way to discover all that the Internet Archive has to offer is to think in terms of categories of records. I’m going to share with you ten genealogy record categories that include several specific types of records.

Start your search for each category using just a few keywords such as:

  • a location (town, county, etc.)
  • the type of record,
  • a family surname, etc.

Next try applying some of the filters found in the column on the left side of the screen. I try several combinations of searches to ensure that I’ve found all that the Internet Archive has to offer. Let’s get started:

Genealogy Records Category #1: Church Records

In Elevenses with Lisa episode 41 we discussed how to find and use church records for your family history. Here are just a few of the specific types of church records you can find at the Internet Archive:

  • Meeting Minutes
  • Church Histories
  • Quaker Records

Genealogy Records Category #2: Family Records

Including:

  • Compiled Family Histories
  • Family History (general)
  • Family Bibles

Learn more about finding and using family bibles for genealogy in Elevenses with Lisa episode 29.

Genealogy Records Category #3: Location-Based Records

Including:

  • Location History (Example: Randolph County Indiana History)
  • City and Rural Directories
  • Almanacs
  • International
  • Newspapers
  • Gazetteers
  • Plat Maps

Genealogy Records Category #4: School Records

Including:

  • Yearbooks
  • Student Newspapers
  • High School, College, etc.

Genealogy Records Type #5: Work Records

Including:

  • Trade journals
  • Corporate histories
  • Works Progress Administration (WPA)
  • Civilian Conversation Corps (CCC)

Genealogy Records Category #6: Military Records

Including:

  • Military Radio Shows
  • Newsreels
  • Military histories
  • Photographic reports
  • Veterans Administration Payment Records
  • WWI County Honor Books

Elevenses with Lisa episode 31 features the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library which hosts much of their content on the Internet Archive. Tip: If you find a collection difficult to navigate, visit the website of the sponsoring organization (such as the Allen County Public Library) which may have a better user interface for searching the records.

Genealogy Records Category #7: Patent Records

From the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Keep in mind that your ancestor may be mentioned in a patent even though they did not file it.

Genealogy Records Category #8: Probate Records

Although there doesn’t currently appear to be a large number of probate records, the Internet Archive does have some. Try searching by location to see if it includes a probate record for others from the same community. For example, a prominent shopkeeper might list many in the town who owed them money.  

Genealogy Records Category #9: Audio and Video Records

Audio records include:

  • Oral interviews
  • Old radio shows
  • Music from days gone by (78s, cylinders, etc.)

Genealogy Gems Premium Members: Listen to episode 176 of the Genealogy Gems Premium Podcast for more on the Great 78 Project at the Internet Archive. (Learn more about joining us as a Premium Member.)

Video records can include:

  • Old home movies
  • Local shows and news
  • Newsreels shown in movie theaters
  • History Documentaries

I searched for the small town where my husband’s ancestors lived for several generations and found a great video from 1954. It featured a parade float sponsored by his great grandfather’s business and several faces I recognized! Watch Winthrop Days.

Genealogy Records Category #10: Collections!

A collection is a group of records submitted by a user. Often times these will be organizations, libraries and archives.

You’ll find the most popular collections listed on the Internet Archive home page. You can also search collections from the Advanced Search.

Here are just a few examples of collections that may be of interest to you as a genealogist:

Borrowing Books from the Internet Archive

Visit the Books to Borrow collection. You will need to be logged into your free Internet Archive account in order to borrow books. You can borrow the book in 1 hour increments. In some cases, you can choose a 14-day loan. If there is only one copy of the book available, the 1 hour load will be the only option. If there are no copies available you can join a waitlist. No waitlist is necessary for one hour loan ebooks.

Learn more about creating your own collection at the Internet Archive.

Tips for Using the Internet Archive

Tip: Find More at the Internet Archive

Scroll down below the individual item for:

  • Download options
  • “In Collections” (which can lead you to more content from the same collection)
  • Similar items

Also, when you find an Item of interest, click the Contributor link to see all of the items uploaded by the user. It’s very likely they will have additional similar items.

Tip: Use the Internet Archive Advanced Search and Search Help

One advantage to using the Advanced Search is when you are searching for items from a specific timeframe. It’s much more efficient than clicking the box for very year in the range in the filter.

Tip: Downloading from the Internet Archive

Download the full cover version of the PDF when available. Images will likely be clearer and more accurate.

More Interesting Content at the Internet Archive:

  • Video Game Oregon Trail
  • Old Radio Programs
  • bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1872
  • Veteran’s Administration Pension Payment Collection
  • Oaths of Allegiance and Naturalization Index
  • Genealogical publications

Answers to Live Chat Questions

One of the advantages of tuning into the live broadcast of each Elevenses with Lisa show is participating in the Live Chat and asking your questions.

Question from Sue: What does metadata mean?
Lisa’s Answer: Metadata is data that describes other data. For example, the date of upload is metadata for a digital file that you find online. Metadata is often added by the person or institution doing the uploading to the Internet Archive. I like to search both “Metadata” and “text contents”.

Question from CA: ​Date filter really applies to date posted not date of item u r looking for….correct?
Lisa’s Answer: In the case of genealogical documents, the date typically refers to the date of original publication rather than the date posted. You will find dates back into the 19th century in the filters.

Question from Mary: ​is there a print icon? I don’t see it.
Lisa’s Answer: Instead of printing, look for the download options. Once downloaded to your computer, then you can print. 

Downloading at Internet Archive

Click the options icon (3 dots in the round circle just below the Search icon) on the left side of the viewer to find the Downloadable Adobe files, or look for Download options below the item.

Question from Susie: ​Would this site have membership of Rotary clubs and such type groups?
Lisa’s Answer: Absolutely! Search for “rotary club” and perhaps the name of the town or locality.

Rotary Club records at Internet Archive

An example of a Rotary Club record from 1951 at the Internet Archive.

Question from Sally: Is broadest search METADATA? Does it catch everything?
Lisa’s Answer: No. Metadata is the default. I would strongly advise running both Metadata and text context searches for your search terms.

Question from Amy: ​Lisa, do you know of a way to correct records that are incorrectly or in sufficiently tagged?
Lisa’s Answer: To the best of my knowledge, you can only do that if you were the one who uploaded the item. If anyone else reading this has found a way to edit or tag other user’s items, please leave a comment below.

Question from John: You may have mentioned this but what is the difference between searching metadata or searching text?
Lisa’s Answer: Searching metadata is only searching the data (like tags) that were added to provide more information about the item. A text context search will search all the text that was typed including the title and description. I recommend searching both ways. Keep in mind that not all user’s include detailed descriptions, which is why metadata is very important.

Question from K M: ​Why does Allen County Library have this archive?
Lisa’s Answer: I think it may be because the Internet Archive provides affordable cloud storage which can be a big expense when offering online records.

Question from Karen: Lisa will you explain the download options?
Lisa’s Answer: Options are based on the type of item. For print publications you will often find you can download the item as an EPUB, PDF, Full Text, etc. Download options can be found by scrolling down just below the item near the description and Views. You can also found download options for Adobe files while viewing the item in the viewer. Click the three dots in a circle icon just below the search icon.

Question from Barbara: Would audio include old local radio programs?
Lisa’s Answer: Absolutely!

Question from Rita: Can you share info about how to upload something?
Lisa’s Answer: Learn more about creating your own collection at the Internet Archive.

Question from Margaret: What about information on the Mayflower?
Lisa’s Answer: Yes. Search Mayflower and then use the filters to narrow your results by Topic & Subject and by Year.

Question from Jeremy: Any pointers on Swiss Mennonites, Lisa?
Lisa’s Answer: A search of Swiss Mennonites brings up 21 items, some of which look rather interesting. Otherwise, like with all genealogy research, formulating a more specific question can help you craft a better search query at the Internet Archive.

Subscribing to the Genealogy Gems YouTube Channel:

 

Resources

Genealogy Gems Podcast Episode 201

with Lisa Louise Cooke

  

In this episode, I chat with Angela Walton-Raji, expert in U.S. and African-American research, about tips for interviewing relatives and taking your African-American family tree back to the era of slavery.

Other highlights of this episode include:

  • A RootsTech 2017 recap, with info on archived streaming sessions;
  • Great news from Findmypast about its new Catholic Heritage Archive;
  • A ground-breaking study from AncestryDNA that identifies specific migration patterns among genetically-related clusters of people;
  • Follow-up mail from Lisa’s Episode 200 celebration;
  • An expert Q&A on finding relatives who don’t appear in the census where you expect them to;
  • A teaser clip from the upcoming Genealogy Gems Book Club interview with Annie Barrows, author of The Truth According to Us.

ROOTSTECH 2017 RECAP

Genealogy Gems booth streaming sessions are on the Genealogy Gems Podcast Facebook page. “Like” our page, and then scroll down to Videos and click See all (shown here).

You’ll find:

  1. Lisa Louise Cooke: Google search methodology for genealogy, using Google Earth for genealogy and creating memorable, easy family history videos;
  2. Diahan Southard: Understanding your DNA ethnic pie chart;
  3. Amie Tennant: Digital journaling and scrapbooking;
  4. Sunny Morton: Jogging your memories and “Genealogy Jackpot” (on researching her ancestors’ survival of the Great Johnstown flood of 1889.

 

POPULAR ROOTSTECH STREAMING LECTURE “THE BIG 4” NOW ONLINE

Watch “The Big 4: Comparing Ancestry, FamilySearch, Findmypast and MyHeritage” by Gems Editor Sunny Morton and catch a summary of its main points

Catch our future free Genealogy Gems streaming sessions on Facebook!

You can also Like and follow the Genealogy Gems Facebook page to hear about (and sometimes watch) streaming sessions.

 

GENEALOGY GEMS APP BONUS MATERIAL

If you listen through the Genealogy Gems app (FREE in Google Play) and $2.99 for Windows, iPhone and iPad users), your bonus material for this episode is a short video clip showing a time-lapse perspective on RootsTech 2017 from the exhibitor hall.

 

NEWS: FINDMYPAST CATHOLIC HERITAGE ARCHIVE

Catholic Heritage Archive at Findmypast.com

In the Boston Globe: Archdiocese of Boston and New England Historic Genealogical Society plans to bring 10 million+ parish records online

MAILBOX:

Robin mentioned she’s learned so much from Lisa on these topics:

Start creating fabulous, irresistible videos about your family history with Animoto.com. You don’t need special video-editing skills: just drag and drop your photos and videos, pick a layout and music, add a little text and voila! You’ve got an awesome video! Try this out for yourself at Animoto.com.

Keep your family history research, photos, tree software files, videos and all other computer files safely backed up with Backblaze, the official cloud-based computer backup system for Lisa Louise Cooke’s Genealogy Gems. Learn more at http://www.backblaze.com/Lisa.

INTERVIEW: ANGELA WALTON-RAJI

Angela Walton-Raji instructs the African-American Genealogy Research Essentials webinar.

Angela’s oral history questions: What to ask your elders

Did they happen to know anyone who had been born a slave when they were a child?

Who was the oldest person that you remember when you were a child? And did that person ever talk about anyone who may have been enslaved?

What do you know about where the family was from? (Were we always from Georgia, or, were we always from Pennsylvania, or was there a time when we came from another place? (Read more about the Great Migration she mentioned.) Why did we move? Who remembers that journey?

Were people involved in the Civil Rights movement, in the Garvey era, with the Freedom Riders, or other important events in their lifetime? What kinds of things did they see?

Who in the family participated in the military (in World War II, I, the Spanish-American War)? African-American military units through the mid-20th century were still referred to as Buffalo soldiers. (She mentioned the Triple Nickel, a unit of all-black World War II paratroopers.

MyHeritage.com is the place to make connections with relatives overseas, particularly with those who may still live in your ancestral homeland. Click here to see what MyHeritage can do for you: it’s free to get started.

 

 

Lisa Louise Cooke uses and recommends RootsMagic family history software. From within RootsMagic, you can search WebHints on FamilySearch.org, Findmypast.com and MyHeritage.com. Soon RootsMagic will also be able to search records and even sync your tree with Ancestry.com, too.

 

 

 

 

EXPERT TIP ON FINDING ANCESTORS “MISSING” IN CENSUSES

Read their Q&A: Kate Eakman takes on a Gems listener question from someone who has already done a lot of work trying to locate a relative in the 1940 U.S. census

Legacy Tree Genealogists provides expert genealogy research service that works with your research goals, budget and schedule. The Legacy Tree Discovery package offers 3.5 hours of preliminary analysis and research recommendations: a great choice if you’ve hit a brick wall in your research and could use some expert guidance.

DNA WITH YOUR DNA GUIDE DIAHAN SOUTHARD: ANCESTRYDNA STUDY BREAKTHROUGH

There is no doubt that this is an exciting time to be a genealogist. Here at Genealogy Gems, we are announcing new record collections online every month, advances in genealogy databases and their ability to retrieve the information we are looking for, and of course, DNA testing. There really has been no time in history where such a wealth of information about our past has been so readily available to so many.

In another ground-breaking development in the DNA world has been a recent publication in a scientific journal by the scientific team at AnccestryDNA. It is titled, “Clustering of 770,000 genomes reveals post-colonial population structure of North America.” Or, in more understandable terms, “Your DNA can tell us where you came from in America in the last 500 years.”

Wow, right? So how did they do this?

Well, the power really is in the numbers. In this particular paper they used 770,000 people, but now that they are approaching having testing 4 million people, you can bet the same principles will be applied to a larger data set and we will see even more as a result. But even though it takes a large data set to accomplish this, it really all still comes down to the relationship of two people.

To start, Ancestry determines how just two people are genetically related. Then they find how those two are related to a third, again, looking only at pairs of people. This goes on and on and on until everyone in the group as been compared. Then we use a graph to plot those relationships, with those more closely related clustering around each other.  Then the real key, the point where we see the marriage of genetics and genealogy: they add in the family history information for each of these individuals in the cluster. What they found was astounding. They have displayed the data in Figure 3 in the paper:

Distribution of ancestral birth locations in North America. Summary map from Nature Communications; click to see article with full explanation of map data. Image used with permission of Ancestry.com.

It is a map of the United States with colored dots scattered across the landscape. The location of the dots corresponds to the genealogy of those tested, while the color of the dots relates to their genetic clustering. Those who clustered closest together are the same color. The result is a nearly perfect rainbow, with each color holding its respective spot on the map, with very little overlap between groups. (There are actually two maps in the paper, just to make things easier to see.)

We might be tempted when looking at the maps to think, oh, well, of course there is a large population of European Jews in New York, everyone knows that, no breakthrough there. But it IS!! This isn’t their family history, or their accent or their culture that is telling us this, it is their genetics!

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, further on in the paper they describe how we can trace migration patterns of different groups over just a few generations. In the paper they specifically mention French Canadians and Cajuns/Acadians, but this same principle can theoretically be applied to dozens of other groups.

For example, let’s say you have an ancestor in Texas about 4 generations ago, but you aren’t sure where she came from. If technology like what is published in this paper ever reaches your testing company, your DNA could tell you that you fit into the Lower South group, meaning that your ancestor likely hails from, well, the South!

This is just a glimpse into what the advances in genetics are bringing to your genealogy toolbox. So hang on to your hats, and keep tuned in here at Genealogy Gems for all of the latest updates.

 

GENEALOGY GEMS BOOK CLUB

 

The Truth According to Us by internationally bestselling author Annie Barrows

It’s the summer of 1938, and wealthy young socialite Miss Layla Beck is now on the dole as a WPA worker, assigned to write a history of the small town of Macedonia, West Virginia. As she starts asking questions about the town’s past, she is drawn into the secrets of the family she’s staying with and drawn to a certain handsome member of that family. She and two of those family members take turns narrating the story from different points of view, exploring the theme that historical truth, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.

Annie Barrows is also the co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This novel takes place after World War II in a London recovering from the Blitz and an island recovering from German occupation. At the heart of Guernsey is an unlikely love story and the inspiring tale of a community that took care of each other in their darkest days with humor, compassion and good books.

Click here to see more Genealogy Gems Book Club selections and how you can listen to Lisa’s upcoming exclusive conversation with author Annie Barrows about The Truth According to Us.

Subscribe to the Genealogy Gems newsletter to receive a free weekly e-mail newsletter, with tips, inspiration and money-saving deals.Genealogy Gems Newsletter Sign Up

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Lisa Louise Cooke, Host and Producer

Sunny Morton, Editor

Amie Tennant, Content Contributor

Diahan Southard, Your DNA Guide, Content Contributor

Lacey Cooke, Service Manager

Vienna Thomas, Associate Producer

Hannah Fullerton: Production Assistance

Check out this new episode!

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

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