22 Million Completely Searchable Books and Records on the Internet Archive

One of the least known valuable genealogical resources is the Internet Archive or Archive.org. This website is rapidly becoming the largest, free, downloadable, completely accessible collection of books and other records on the Internet. Unlike many other collections of "public domain" books and texts, the Internet Archive has added recent books that have released or lost copyright protection in the United States.

Some of the most valuable sources of genealogical data in this vast collection are the local county histories. Here is one for an example:

https://archive.org/details/cu31924028853327/page/7

This history was published in 1909 and contains a detailed index with hundreds of names of people from Dutchess County, New York.

In addition, the item is completely searchable, word by word.

Many of the items recovered by Reclaim the Records from making freedom of information requests and filing lawsuits are also featured in the Internet Archive.

https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

You can see the records that have been "reclaimed" on the website and many of those have links to the Internet Archive.

This is definitely a website you need to take some time and learn to use.