Research resources
Images
- Ebay for images of places – then follow that search and you’ll receive an email when new items are added
- 500 px
- Google image search – and you can use this to try to discover the source for a photo you already have – just drag the jpg and it will try to find that photo on other sites
- Youtube – search for history videos and real estate sale videos
- Findagrave.com often includes images on their records
- DigitalNC for North Carolina historical images
- Surry County Historical Society – Home (surryhistoricalsociety.org)
- https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/ Not just New York stuff
- https://www.alamy.com/
- By Topic – Rare Historical Photos
- Historical Photos | Buy Photos | AP Images (more recent stuff, but handy for images of historic events from the 20th c.)
- Digital Photography Collections | National Archives
- Old-New-Orleans – (thepastwhispers.com)
- http://www.idaillinois.org/digital/collection/qpl/search
- West Virginia: West Virginia History OnView | WVU Libraries
- The National Archives Catalog
- Google Street View is very helpful in confirming locations and addresses of the photos. You can virtually click smoothly up and down streets using the navigation arrows.
- Zillow and RealEstate.com – and other real estate sites to find interior images and the date buildings were constructed to confirm when a building was around.
- Home | UNLV Special Collections Portal
- Visual Resources – Cornell University Library
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Browse Maps A-Z – Vintage City Maps (go full screen then screengrab). these are lithos not maps
- Search all (Getty Museum)
- Arizona Memory Project (azlibrary.gov)
- Digital Commons @ CSUMB
Maps
- David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
- Library of Congress
Newspapers/Publications
- Civil War Newspapers – Virginia Tech
- Harper’s Monthly
- newspapers.com
- Pulaski County, Virginia Library System Newspapers archive
- https://virginiachronicle.com – tip – don’t use their clip tool – zoom big on screen and use screen capture. Make sure you note the publication name and date
- Quincy, Illinois newspaper archive: Newspaper Archive | Quincy Public Library (quincylibrary.org) THESE PAPERS ARE NOT ON NEWSPAPERS.COM
- Warsaw Public Library Newspaper archive: this is an amazing collection of papers that include the Warsaw and Hancock County. These papers also mention things from other towns such as Canton and Quincy. Clipping function great. THESE PAPERS ARE NOT ON NEWSPAPERS.COM
- HathiTrust Digital Library | Millions of books online I was able to find the college catalogs from my gg grandfather’s college on here.
- Google Books
Archives
- Library of Virginia – Chancery Records – fabulous trove of court cases you can download the entire case file
- https://wvhistoryonview.org
- West Virginia Vital Research Records – Select Search Type (wvculture.org) Use Firefox to download images
- www.wvancestry.com – huge treasure trove of downloadable PDFs of books and records
- https://s1.sos.mo.gov/Records/Archives/ArchivesDb/JudicialRecords/ – Missouri
- https://s1.sos.mo.gov/mdh/browse.asp?id=All
- fold3.com – military records
- ordering military records https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/military-personnel
- Documenting the American South homepage (unc.edu): a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Books
- Interlibrary Loan – If you have a library card, you can request books from anywhere in the US. Whenever I learn of a book (such as on Amazon), I request it from my library first before buying. I keep my library’s interlibrary loan email on file along with my card number so I can quickly create a request and then move on.
- Google Books has many old books available for download
- Cornell University Library Making of America Collection -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. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts. The collection comprises the digitized pages of books and journals. This system allows you to view scanned images of the actual pages of the 19th century texts. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been performed on the images to enhance searching and accessing the texts.
- FamilySearch Digital Library
Websites
- GenealogyTools.com useful news and articles for genealogists and family historians as well as a collection of instructional video screen recordings, called screencasts, showing you step-by-step, how to make the most of your computer for genealogy.
Miscellaneous
historical-timeline-of-pulaski-county.pdf (pulaskicounty.org)
Virginia Formation Maps (rootsweb.com) Interactive map showing chronological county line changes.
Weekday Calculator – What Day is this Date? (timeanddate.com)
or ask Siri “What day of the week was [date]”
or Google
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