Google has several search engines and databases that are very useful for genealogy researchers. Here is an overview of some of these databases and functions. Google Books has a seemingly never-ending supply of digitized books. And there is an ample number of old books that can be used in your genealogy research. Generally, there are […]
Author: Kenneth R Marks
Kenneth R Marks was born and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving a BS in Mathematics in 1968. His career was in Information Technology; with the last 20 Years as a software executive with Boeing, Pearson, and NASA. His genealogy career began in 2004. He is an expert in newspaper research for genealogy, as well as additional genealogy topics. He regularly conducts webinars on the subject and has authored three genealogy books. See the About page for more details.
The Ancestor Hunt, founded in 2008, is focused on helping genealogy and family history researchers of all skill levels to achieve their goals, by providing links to free online genealogy collections, and search tips and techniques, largely via easy-to-understand Quick Reference Guides.
Over the past few decades, thanks to volunteers, librarians, and archivists, a great number of indexes to obituary information and transcriptions of obituaries from newspapers have been provided for free online. These searchable indexes provide the location in old newspapers where the obituary can be found. Sometimes the scanned newspaper clipping is included. And remember you […]
One of the main goals for genealogists is to find obituaries. Obituaries are a gold mine of information. They provide death dates and locations, funeral and cemetery information, and more importantly – information about the relatives of the deceased’s family and extended family. This family name information is often not found anywhere else. Over the past […]
Reclaim the Records is a non-profit organization that strives to obtain genealogical record collections that “ought to be” in the public domain but are restricted by government organizations. They file FOIA and Open Data requests to obtain the records and if that fails to succeed, they go to court. Once records are obtained, the organization […]
Did you know that there are many Free Obituary Collections and Free Obituary Index Collections available on Ancestry dot com? And yes, you do not need a subscription to access them (but you need to have registered, which is free). Below is the list of the 1,202 Free and Free Index Collections (as of May […]
In February 2017, I started publishing a list of the catalog of online historical newspapers from over 400 different collections put together by the Advantage Archives Company, developed in conjunction with the libraries, historical societies, and museums across the U.S. that preserve historical newspapers for their communities. The list has grown a lot since then. […]
Did you know that over 100 million newspaper obituary records are available from FamilySearch in 50 different collections? All but 1 collection have searchable indexes, and there are collections with images from newspapers, images from index card transcriptions only, and collections that are indexes only. Now, most do not have newspaper images available for free […]
GenealogyBank, a subscription newspaper site, has announced its’ updates for May 2023. There are 30 New Titles and 17 Titles that have had issues added in the previous month. From GenealogyBank: Here are some of the details about our most recent U.S. newspaper additions: Here is a list of the May additions. To see our […]
Veridian Software has many clients with collections of digitized newspapers that can be searched for free. Over 50 million pages currently. They power California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming state newspaper collections. And country-wide collections, such as Estonia, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and Switzerland. Veridian is the name of the software and […]
The Ancestor Hunt has been cataloging and listing links to free online genealogy collections in over 24 different record categories since 2014. These are available for you to view and use via the Resources tab above. There is a massive amount of genealogy and historical material that can help us researchers as we discover who belongs in […]