Reading old books for family history research

Looking for more information for your family tree? I came across a couple of excellent sites for family history research – and best of all one of them is completely free!

Archive.org is brilliant – it has digitised texts of thousands of old books on all kinds of subjects. Free.

Google Books has searchable texts, many of which are available to read free online. Some are in ‘snippet view only’, which means you’d need to buy a hard copy of the book or magazine, but at least you know whether it would be worth buying.

And The British Newspaper Archive is absolutely excellent, with literally millions of issues of digitised newspapers and magazines, all searchable and easily selected by date and local area. Unfortunately, you have to pay about £80 a year for access, but I got my money’s worth in the first day, finding amazing articles about my family members. I even found out something I didn’t know about a house I lived in for eighteen years!