ProQuest Genealogy

Many local public libraries and universities subscribe to ProQuest.com. Although the company's digital resources cover much more than just genealogy, they do have a large number of valuable resources for genealogists. Here is a description of the company from their website.

ProQuest is a key partner for content holders of all types, preserving and enabling access to their rich and varied information. Those partnerships have built a growing content collection that now encompasses 90,000 authoritative sources, 6 billion digital pages and spans six centuries. It includes the world’s largest collection of dissertations and theses; 20 million pages and three centuries of global, national, regional and specialty newspapers; more than 450,000 ebooks; rich aggregated collections of the world’s most important scholarly journals and periodicals; and unique vaults of digitized historical collections from great libraries and museums, as well as organizations as varied as the Royal Archives, the Associated Press and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

ProQuest.com supplies both the HeritageQuest.com and Library Edition of Ancestry.com to many libraries. 

AncestryHeritageQuest.com has some of the following resources:

• City Directories
• 1850 and 1860 Slave Schedules
• U.S. Indian Census Rolls
• Mortality Schedules
• Agricultural and Industrial Schedules
• 1890 Veterans Schedule

If these databases look familiar, it is because Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest.com have been business partners for some time now. See "ProQuest Advances Genealogical Research with HeritageQuest Online." This is old news, but it bears repeating. 

You should check out your public library at the town or city level, the county level and at the state level for access to ProQuest.com and HeritageQuest.com and the library edition of Ancestry.com.