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!

Even if your ancestors haven’t written any books and aren’t likely to be mentioned in any newspapers (you’d be surprised!), the towns or cities where they lived are probably described in some of these ancient volumes.

Another use is to discover more about the jobs your family did, or read contemporary accounts of national news in their times, events in their home towns and news items about people who lived in the same road. You can also gain access to relevant statistics in Government reports, for example about emigration, income or employment.

You may find family birth or death announcements, minutes of committees or public meetings they attended, newspaper advertisements for the businesses your family owned or information about employers they worked for, or announcements of auctions for houses your ancestors lived in.

If you’re writing a book or blog about your family history and want to include extracts from these documents, don’t forget to check copyright laws in your country and the country the account was published.