14,228,779 Ebooks and Texts to Search for Genealogy

One of my favorite websites and one that I frequently mention is the Internet Archive or Archive.org. The vast numbers of different resources on this website make it an important research tool for genealogists. As you can see above, they have expanded their holdings of ebooks and texts to over 14 million. The additional holdings of the Internet Archive include the following:

• 304 billion webpages saved into the Wayback Machine, a website archive
• 3,553,259 moving images including movies and television archives
• 3,592,080 audio and music recordings
• 1,416,000 TV news show clips since 2009
•  188,853 archived software programs including vintage and historical software
• 1,502,827 images
• 175,740 live music recordings including 11,354 Grateful Dead concerts
• 288,882 media collections

I have mentioned the Internet Archive in 190 previous posts. Of course, that is out of almost 5000 posts. The reason I have mentioned it so many times is that every time I teach a class and talk about the Internet Archive I draw almost uniform blank looks. Most researchers today spend all their time on the big online genealogy database websites and subsequently mostly ignore any program that is not specifically identified as a genealogical resource.

Just within the last week or so, I used the Internet Archive for a digital copy of one of the old Tanner surname books that I needed to refer to. I consistently find genealogically relative material on the Internet Archive that is apparently much harder to find on any other website. A year ago, I even did a webinar on using the Internet Archive for genealogical research.

Using the Internet Archive for Genealogy - James Tanner

The reason for revisiting the topic in this post is that the number of e-books and texts has increased well over 2 million items since that webinar was presented in 2016.