I’ve amassed quite a number of favorite genealogy websites under my “Ancestry” bookmarks folder on Chrome and I thought I would take the time to share some of them with you. There will be websites that are fairly well known but others will be a bit more obscure. I intend to go in alphabetical order as I post each week but I can’t promise that I won’t skip around!
Access Genealogy
The URL for this free site is https://accessgenealogy.com/. Their home page is full of pictures and articles and is frequently updated. I have been subscribing to their blog posts and the topics vary from “Czechs in Cleveland” to “The Heritage of Clarks, Nebraska” to “An Account of the Captivity of Hugh Gibson”. This website was started over 20 years ago.
According to their home page, they specialize in Native American genealogy, but they also have links to free databases and sources online for all types of genealogical records. The home page explains how to do searches on their site for these records.
Besides Native American, the tab headers include Black Genealogy, Cemetery Records, Census Records, DNA, Military Records, and Vital Records. There are also links to records for US States on the side. I looked up Colorado and saw an interesting title: “Highway 83 Abandoned Cemetery, Arapahoe County, Colorado”. Four individuals are buried there. With a bit of googling, I found that this abandoned cemetery is (or was, not sure if it is still there) somewhere between S. Parker Road and S. Jordan Road and is known as the Lewis Cemetery.
Under the Military Records tab, I discovered that the National Park Service has a database for all of the prisoners of war in the infamous Andersonville Prison. I was able to find my great-great-grandfather, John A. Johnson, who served in the 38th Illinois Regiment, was captured, sent to Andersonville, and miraculously survived.
Key in the search term Biographies in the search bar and many biographies will pop up in the results section. You can narrow the search results by location. For instance, there are 470 biographies of people from Ontario, Canada.
Many of the links direct you to FamilySearch.org, the largest database of genealogical records not behind a paywall, but some of the links lead you to transcriptions such as the Register of St. Philip’s Parish, South Carolina which I arrived at through the South Carolina link on the right-hand side of the home page. Unfortunately, some of the links will also direct you to a paid site such as Ancestry.
I encourage you to check this out, especially if your subscription to Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, etc. has lapsed and it’s driving you bonkers not being able to do your genealogy the way you were doing it before. There is plenty out there to find, you just have to do a bit of creative hunting!
Smart Canyon Genealogy 