LibGuides: Genealogy and Family History: Records/other Primary Sources

Cemetery Records

BillionGraves BillionGraves is the world's largest resource for searchable GPS cemetery data, and is growing bigger and better every day.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Find a Grave At Find a Grave you’ll find details about cemeteries and individual memorials for many people buried in those cemeteries. Memorials generally include birth, death and burial information and may include pictures, biographies, family information and more. Members can contribute what they know and can leave remembrances via 'virtual flowers' on the memorials they visit, completing the virtual cemetery experience.
Interment.net This website contains 25+ million cemetery records, transcripts, and burial registers, from tens of thousands of cemeteries across the world, all contributed by genealogists, cemeteries, government agencies, and private organizations.

Census Records

1880 and 1900 Idaho Census Data Project
FreeCEN The aim of FreeCEN is to provide free internet searches of the 19th century UK census returns. The first UK census to include names and other details of UK residents took place in 1841. Since then, a census has been held every ten years.
United States Census Bureau
United States Census Records United States Census Records from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Court & Probate Records

Cause Papers in the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishopric of York, 1300-1858 The records of the church courts in the diocese of York, housed in the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, are the most extensive records of their type in the United Kingdom, dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and covering Yorkshire and beyond.
National Archives Court Records
National Records of Scotland: Wills and Testaments
Probate Search Search Probate records and wills for England and Wales.
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)
Utah County Probate Records, 1850-1896 "When the Utah Territorial Legislature established the jurisdiction and authority of county probate courts in 1851, it established the jurisdiction of these courts over probate. The Legislature granted county probate courts authority “to probate wills, administer the estates of deceased persons, and to establish guardianships of minors, idiots, and the insane" (An Act in Relation to the Judiciary. Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials passed by the First Annual, and Special Sessions of the Legislative Assembly. Great Salt Lake City, 1851, Brigham H. Young, Printer. pp. 38-48). During a portion of Utah’s territorial period, county probate courts additionally held jurisdiction over criminal and civil matters. This is significant to probate researchers because early probate records may be mixed with other kinds of cases. When Utah became a state (1896) the county probate courts were abolished. Probate became the jurisdiction of the district court in each county." (Utah Division of Archives and Records Service)

Directory of State Archives

Directory of State Archives

Immigration & Naturalization Records

Alien Files ("A-Files") "The United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) signed an agreement on June 3, 2009, to make the Alien Files a permanent series of records, transferred to NARA custody 100 years after the immigrant's year of birth. Alien Files or A-Files are a rich source of biographical information in that they contain relatively modern immigration documents, all in one file." (NARA)
Immigration Records NARA has immigration records for arrivals to the United States from foreign ports between approximately 1820 and 1982. The records are arranged by Port of Arrival.
Japanese Immigrants to the United States, 1887-1924
Naturalization Records "Naturalization is the process by which an alien becomes an American citizen. These records can provide a researcher with information such as a person's birth date and location, occupation, immigration year, marital status and spouse information, witnesses' names and addresses, and more." (NARA)

Land Records

General Land Office Records (Bureau of Land Management) The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), General Land Office (GLO) Records database provides access to Federal land conveyance records for the Public Land States. It also provides image access to more than three million Federal land title records for Eastern Public Land States, issued between 1820 and 1908.
Land Records "The land records that are generally of most interest to genealogists are the land entry case files. These are records that document the transfer of public lands from the U.S. Government to private ownership. There are over ten million such individual land transactions in the custody of the National Archives. These case files cover land entries in all 30 public land states."
Sanborn Maps The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions.
Territorial Records on Microfilm

Maritime & Military Records

The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database "The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS) is a database containing information about the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Other information on the site includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records, which will be amended over time. The CWSS is a cooperative effort between the National Park Service and several public and private partners whose goal is to increase Americans' understanding of this decisive era in American history by making information about it widely accessible." (NPS)
Maritime Records
Naval & Marine Records
State-Level Lists of Fatal Casualties of the Korean War (6/28/1950 - 3/10/1954) and the Vietnam War (6/8/1956 - 5/28/2006) "The National Archives and Records Administration prepared these state level casualty lists by creating extracts from the Korean War Extract Data File and the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File, both as of April 29, 2008, of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Files, part of Record Group 330: Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The lists are based on the "home of record - state" data provided by the serviceman or woman upon last entrance into military service. "Home of record" does not necessarily refer to the place of birth, residence of next of kin, place of longest residence, nor other common uses of the term "hometown." Full casualty records may be retrieved online through the Access to Archival Databases ( AAD) resource." (NARA)
Veterans' Service Records United States Military records housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
WWII Army and Army Air Force Casualties Listed alphabetically by State.
WWII Casualties: Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard Personnel Listed alphabetically by State, casualties of those who served in the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard during WW II. (NARA)

Newspapers

Chronicling America "Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1924 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress." (Library of Congress)
Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection "A service of the Colorado State Library, the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) currently includes more than 971,000 digitized pages, representing more than 200 individual newspaper titles published in Colorado primarily from 1859 to 1923. Due to copyright restrictions, the CHNC does not always include newspapers published after 1922, but the CHNC can digitize beyond 1922 if publisher permission can be secured."
Historic Oregon Newspapers "On this site you can search and access complete content for historic Oregon newspapers that have been digitized as part of the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program (ODNP)."
Utah Digital Newspapers "The Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN) program has been operating at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library since 2002. UDN is recognized as one of the leaders in newspaper digitization in the United States, especially within the public sector. Our collection holds over 1,000,000 pages of historic Utah newspapers and it grows monthly. Its newspapers can be browsed by issue or searched by keywords, article titles, weddings, deaths, and births."
Washington State Library Historic Newspapers

Post Office Records

United States Post Office Records "Post office records may deliver interesting information to the genealogical researcher seeking more information about an ancestor or an ancestor's community. Microfilmed records include postmaster appointment records and records showing the location of post offices."

Prison Records

Convict Transportation Registers Database he information relating to these famous Queenslanders' convictions comes, in part, from the British convict transportation registers 1787-1879. Compiled from the British Home Office (HO) records. You can search for over 123 000 of the estimated 160 000 convicts transported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries - names, term of years, transport ships and more.
International Tracing Service The International Tracing Service (ITS) is an archive and a center for documenting National Socialist persecution and the liberated survivors. Former victims of Nazism and their families receive information regarding their incarceration, forced labor and post-war Allied assistance. The more than 30 million documents in the ITS archives also provide the basis for research and education.
Prison Records at the National Archives
Tracing London Convicts in Britain & Australia, 1780-1925
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This website allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey.

Tax Records

Tax Records

Travel Records

Passport Applications "Passport applications can be an excellent source of genealogical information, especially about foreign-born individuals. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has passport applications from Oct. 1795-Mar. 1925; the U.S. Department of State has passport applications from Apr. 1925 to the present." (NARA)
Passport Applications Microfilm Passport applications on microfilm (NARA)

Vital Records

FreeBMD FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records.
Idaho Death Index, State of (BYU-Idaho)
International Genealogical Index (IGI) (FamilySearch) The International Genealogical Index was a family history database that listed several hundred million names of deceased persons from throughout the world. Names in the IGI came from two sources: 1) Community Contributed IGI (Personal family information submitted to the LDS Church) 2) Community Indexed IGI (Vital and church records from the early 1500s to 1885)
Social Security Death Index (GenealogyBank.com) The Social Security Death Index includes over 94 million U.S. citizen death records. Enjoy free access to the most up-to-date SSDI search for individuals with U.S. Social Security numbers. Search the SSDI online for free now or subscribe for access to billions of other genealogy records.
Western States Marriage Records Index (BYU-Idaho)

Genealogy and Family History: Records/other Primary Sources

Introduction

Cemetery Records

Census Records

Court & Probate Records

Directory of State Archives

Immigration & Naturalization Records

Land Records

Maritime & Military Records

Newspapers

Post Office Records

Prison Records

Tax Records

Travel Records

Vital Records