Online Digitized Collections for Genealogy

There are a fabulous number of books online but, likely, no one actually knows how many there are. I recently surveyed a number of large online digitized libraries and decided the problem was impossible to solve due to some libraries counting images or pages and some counting whole books. My best estimate is that there are over 10 million books online and growing daily.

By far the largest collection is in Google Books. A single word search in Google Books on "genealogy" returns over 160,000 books.

Here is a list of digital collections dealing with books pertinent to genealogy:

• Google Books [160,557] Only a minority of the books are completely digitized
• American Memory (Library of Congress)
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)
• Digital Quaker Collection (Earlham School of Religion)
• Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina)
• Family History Archives (Brigham Young University)
• Internet Text Archive
• Making of America (Cornell University)
• Making of America (University of Michigan)
• The New York Times (from 1851)
• Perry-Castaneda Map Collection: Historical Maps (University of Texas)
• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (Cornell University)
  Useful for clergy, anti-slavery activists, African Americans, local history
• Their Own Words (Dickinson College)
• Canadian Genealogy Centre
• Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy
• National Archives and Records Administration
• New York Public Library Digital Library
• Online Archive of California
  

From time to time in near future I will be reviewing these Websites and commenting on the collections. Stay tuned for further developments.