Genealogy: Other Resources

The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries knits together more than 1000 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs to provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war, including what was happening at home. The writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, farmers, seaman, wives, and even spies are included. The letters and diaries are by the famous and the unknown, giving not only both the Northern and Southern perspectives, but those of foreign observers also. The materials originate from all regions of the country and are from people who played a variety of roles. The materials may be browsed by table of contents, or the full text may be searched in a variety of ways.

Digitized collections from the Library of Congress.

Collections that have not yet been migrated from the "American Memory" system can be found at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.

Archive of Americana is a family of comprehensive historical collections that allows researchers to discover and explore the United States in unprecedented depth and detail. It is a unique collection of primary source materials on nearly every aspect of the United States over nearly three centuries.

Includes descriptions of historical documents in libraries, museums, and archives. Use ArchiveGrid to learn what institutions have archival materials on a particular topic, and how to arrange a visit to examine the materials.

The California Heritage is an online archive of more than 36,000 images illustrating California's history and culture, from the collections of the Bancroft Library. Selected from nearly two hundred individual collections, this unique resource uses the latest online archiving techniques to highlight the rich themes of California's history.

Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 150,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. Calisphere's content has been selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations across California.

The David Rumsey Map Collection includes hi-resolution scans of 85,000 maps, primarily of historic interest. The collection includes maps on many topics, but specializes in early mapping of the Americas. Users can pan-and-browse map images, as well as download hi-resolution files. The maps are physically housed at Stanford University’s David Rumsey Map Center (link: https://library.stanford.edu/rumsey)

The collection eventually will cover five centuries of advice literature for men and women. When complete, this collection will include over 50,000 images of original documents with introductory essays.

Documenting the American South (DAS) is a searchable and browsable collection of full-text sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. The Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors DAS, and the texts come primarily from its Southern holdings. An editorial board guides its development.  DAS includes  books and manuscripts, in fourteen thematic collections, including "First Person Narratives of the American South", "Library of Southern Literature", "North American Slave Narratives", "The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865", "The Church in the Southern Black Community", "The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940", and "North Carolinians and the Great War."

Based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography, the collection was first published by Readex in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society (AAS); For decades, the collection has served as a foundation set for research involving early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, and more. This database is an excellent resource for information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable.

Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States, Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. The continuation of Readex's Early American Imprints: Series I, this rich primary source database, based on the authoritative bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and now supplemented by thousands of new items, allows students and scholars to explore the development of the American nation as never before. Designed for researchers of varying skill levels, the interface offers both simple and advanced searching as well as in-depth browsing within sixteen carefully indexed subject categories.

This release of Early Encounters in North America (EENA) contains approximately 40,000 pages of material. When complete the product will include more than 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways. For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700. The collection is centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico. The papers may be browsed by author, source, year, peoples, places, images, fauna, flora, environment, personal events and cultural events.

Use Eighteenth Century Collections Online to access the digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century. With full-text searching of approximately 33 million pages, the product allows researchers new methods of access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.

This digital collection is a resource for the study of American social, cultural, and popular history, providing access to rare primary source material from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History, Duke University and The New York Public Library. It comprises thousands of fully searchable images (alongside transcriptions) of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes. The collection is especially rich in conduct of life and domestic management literature, offering vivid insights into the daily lives of women and men, as well as emphasizing contrasts in regional, urban and rural cultures.

In the late 1800's, Dutch physician and feminist Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the revolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. By the time their successors finished their work in 1945, the Gerritsen Collection was the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world, with over two million pages of materials spanning four centuries and 15 languages.

In 1830, in Philadelphia, Louis Antoine Godey (1804-1878) commenced the publication of Godey's Lady's Book which he designed specifically to attract the growing audience of American women.
The magazine was intended to entertain, inform, and educate the women of America. In addition to extensive fashion descriptions and plates, the early issues included biographical sketches, articles about mineralogy, handcrafts, female costume, the dance, equestrienne procedures, health & hygiene, recipes & remedies, etc. Each issue also contained two pages of sheet music, written essentially for the piano forte. Gradually the periodical matured into an important literary magazine and contained extensive book reviews and works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and many other celebrated 19th century authors who regularly furnished the magazine with essays, poetry and short stories. The Lady's Book was also a vast reservoir of handsome illustrations, which included hand-colored fashion plates, mezzotints, engravings, woodcuts, and ultimately chromolithographs.
The Web version, from Accessible Archives, contain the rich, comprehensive material found in leading historic periodicals and books. Eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records are available.

Hearth is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available.

The Historic Government Publications from World War II contains 343 Informational pamphlets, government reports, instructions, regulations, declarations, speeches, and propaganda materials distributed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) during the Second World War. The documents, which reflect the thinking of the time, range widely in topics. You can view information on many categories, such as women's issues, children's issues, pocket guides to other countries, and more. You can view series, like the Victory Bulletin and 10 issues of the State Summary of War Casualties

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The next day, the United States and Britain declared war on Japan. Two months later, on February 19, 1942, the lives of thousands of Japanese Americans were dramatically changed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This order led to the assembly and evacuation and relocation of nearly 122,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry on the west coast of the United States. This site contains personal and official photographs, letters and diaries, transcribed oral histories, art, and more show the faces of the men, women, and children who were incarcerated; the prewar neighborhoods and wartime camps; and daily life there.

Materials accessible here are Cornell University Library's contributions to Making of America (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

Materials accessible here are the University of Michigan Library's contributions to Making of America (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters; from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, plus 7,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from more than 1,000 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous. More than 1,500 biographies will enhance the use of the database. The database is searchable, and browsable by author, date, personal events and historical events.

The Online Archive of California is a collaborative project to create a searchable online union database of finding aids to archival collections. This database includes the finding aids to repositories from 40 institutions statewide, including all nine UC campuses and is continuing to expand. A small but increasing number of the finding aids contain links to online digital versions of the source material. Finding aids are inventories, registers, indexes or guides to collections held by archives and manuscript repositories, libraries, and museums. Finding aids provide detailed descriptions of collections, their intellectual organization and, at varying levels of analysis, of individual items in the collections. Access to the finding aid is essential for understanding the true content of a collection and for determining whether it is likely to satisfy a scholar's research needs. For a detailed description on how to use primary source materials and their associated finding aids see: Library Research Using Primary Sources

Civil War Era contains newspapers and pamphlets which were previously unavailable digitally. The database covers a vast range of topics including the formative economic factors and other forces that led to the abolitionist movement, the 600,000 battle casualties, and the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves.Newspaper Sources (1840-1865)ProQuest Civil War Era allows researchers to follow the development of issues leading to the Civil War as recorded in the papers of the South, North, Mississippi Valley, and Border States. Many interrelated forces influenced the course of events during this 25-year period, and Civil War Era allows serious researchers to discover the details.Southern Titles: Richmond Dispatch (Virginia), Charleston Mercury (South Carolina), New Orleans Times Picayune (Louisiana)Northern Titles: Boston Herald, New York Herald, Columbus State Journal (Ohio)Border State/Mississippi Valley Titles: The Kentucky Daily Journal, Memphis Daily AppealPamphlets from two important collectionsPamphlets (often 20-40 page treatises) were the op-ed pieces of their day. They provided an outlet for individuals to express their views through an alternative channel. These respected pamphlet collections are a perfect complement to the variety of editorial perspectives included in the newspapers.Slavery and Anti-Slavery Pamphlets from the Libraries of Salmon P. Chase & John P. Hale includes 166 pamphlets, speeches, reports, legal opinions, and convention proceedings covering slavery, and anti-slavery movements, and the conditions of African-Americans after the Civil WarCivil War Pamphlets 1861-1865 includes 1,758 pamphlets illustrating the war of words during the conflict. These pamphlets provide a broad ranging view of the issues and attitudes that led to the war and its impact on American society. Included in the collection are biographies, campaign literature, government documents, journals, presidential addresses, sermons, and speeches.

This collection of US congressional documents now includes the full text of Congressional bills and resolutions from 1789-present. This includes private bills, laws passed for the benefit of specific individuals, such as special pensions. You can search by an individual's name, or a family name. Private bills usually contain the phrase "for the relief of".

The Valley of the Shadow Project takes two communities, one Northern and one Southern, through the experience of the American Civil War. The project is a hypermedia archive of thousands of sources for the period before, during, and after the Civil War for Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Those sources include newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, maps, church records, population census, agricultural census, and military records. Students can explore every dimension of the conflict and write their own histories, reconstructing the life stories of women, African Americans, farmers, politicians, soldiers, and families. Also included is a GIS Atlas of the areas covered.

Women and Social Movements is intended to serve as a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2023, the website seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible.