Online Genealogy Resources Continue to Increase

dp.la

Of course, the large online genealogy family tree programs continue to add content, but perhaps you are not as tuned in to the fact that many genealogically valuable records are being regularly added to what most would not consider to be "genealogy oriented" websites. This category includes websites such as Archive.org, the Digital Public Library of America or DP.la and many others.

As you can see from the image above, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has well over 36 million images. Recently, the DPLA announced a partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation. Here is part of the announcement.

In an effort to make artifacts from cultural heritage institutions more accessible to all, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the national aggregator of digital heritage collections, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, are collaborating to incorporate DPLA’s cultural artifacts into Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Funded by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this collaboration will expand the availability of artifacts such as books, maps, government documents, photos, and more from U.S. cultural heritage institutions across the web. 

“If you’re in the business of democratizing knowledge, there’s no better partner than Wikimedia,” said John Bracken, DPLA’s executive director. “As a result of this collaboration, many of the artifacts carefully contributed by our cultural heritage partners across the country and aggregated at dp.la will be seen by millions of people online, which will help to ensure that the story of our nation can be told and retold for generations to come.”  

One of the first collections that will be integrated into Wikimedia projects will be from DPLA’s Pivotal Ventures-funded Black Women and the Suffrage Movement collection—a series of photos, manuscripts, historical documents and more highlighting black women and their contributions to the Suffrage Movement. These artifacts will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the freely-licensed repository of images, videos, and more. Making these items broadly available on Wikimedia sites will amplify the stories of black suffragists, who are all too often left out of the national narrative on women’s suffrage. 

Perhaps it would be helpful to know that the DPLA also has a specifically targeted genealogy area on their website.

https://dp.la/guides/the-family-research-guide-to-dpla

This is one website you may wish to explore and add to your list of must-search places on the internet.

Now, there is also another website to search and that is the Wikimedia website. It is part of the overall umbrella of Wikipedia related websites.

https://www.wikimedia.org/

Sorry to give you more places to learn about and look. :-)