Family and Local Histories  TOP^

Family and local histories provide personal details you won't find in more technical and succinct records. Discover photographs, stories, maps, and histories that add priceless depth and personality to your family history research. This rapidly growing collection of over 20,000 books will be an invaluable tool for expanding your knowledge of your ancestors.

The Family & Local Histories Collection lets you read journals, memoirs, and other first-hand historical narratives right on your computer. Gathered from some of the world's finest libraries, these materials may provide hard-to-find town, county, and state information; tax records and wills; military, church, and court records; as well as photographs, stories, and maps.

• Daughters of the American Revolution Series
• Biographies of Notable Americans
• Slave Narratives
• Historical Encyclopedias
• Genealogical Society Quarterly Publications

• Dictionary of National Biography. The Dictionary of National Biography began in 1882 as an ambitious project spearheaded by George Smith to produce a biographical dictionary of prominent figures from Britain and Ireland from the earliest of times up to 1900. The efforts of hundreds of contributors resulted in a twenty-two volume alphabetical series containing thousands of biographies. This database contains Volumes 1-20, and 22 of this series; it includes the biographies of those with surnames Abbadie through Whewell. It also contains "The Concise Dictionary," which is a summary guide, and index to the rest of the series, and the "Supplement" which deals with people who died too late to be included in earlier volumes. More volumes will be added to the database in the future.
• The Biography and Genealogy Master Index. Millions of Americans have been profiled in collective biography volumes such as Who's Who in America and Women of Science. The Biography and Genealogy Master Index was begun in the 1970s with the purpose of indexing these names to aid researchers. The text has been updated periodically since the first edition appeared in 1980, most recently in March 2003. The index concentrates heavily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to providing the individual's name, birth, and death dates (where available), the source document is included. Sources for this index vary from Who's Who of American Women and National Cyclopedia to American Biography, Directory of American Scholars, and American Black Writers. This database is an essential tool for locating persons who appeared in a "Who's Who" publication in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• American Genealogical-Biographical Index. The AGBI is the equivalent of more than 200 printed volumes. This database contains millions of records for people whose names have appeared in printed genealogical records and family histories. With data from sources largely from the last century, each entry contains the person's complete name, the year of the biography's publication, the person's state of birth (if known), abbreviated biographical data, and the book and page number of the original reference. In addition to family histories, other genealogical collections are indexed. These include the Boston Transcript (a widely-circulated genealogical column), the complete 1790 U.S. Federal Census, and published Revolutionary War records. For researchers of American ancestors, this can be one of the most valuable databases available at Ancestry.
• Dawes Commission Index, 1898-1914. Commonly called the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, the Dawes Commission was appointed by President Grover Cleveland in 1893. In return for abolishing their tribal governments and recognizing state and federal laws, tribe members of the Five Civilized Tribes - the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole - were given a share of common property. This database indexes the original applications for tribal enrollments under the act of 28 June 1898. It also indexes documents such as birth and death affidavits, marriage licenses, and decisions and orders of the Commission.

Types of Records  TOP^
The Family & Local Histories Collection contains a variety of records. This section explains some of the types of records you might find:

Family History
A family history is a book or document that gives facts and information about one or more generations of a family.

Local History
A local history is a book or document that gives facts and information about a town or county. They usually contain a history of the development of the region and information about the prominent families who lived there.

Biography
A biographical sketch can include almost any aspect of a person's life, but generally contains information about the individual's family, education, and occupation. Thus, biographical sketches usually tell the subject's date of birth, parent's names, wife's and children's names, and often their birth dates. Usually there is some information about where they were born.

• In the nineteenth century, some immigrants considered it a mark of success to be included in their local history and paid to be included in the document.
• The greatest number of county and municipal histories were published in the 1880s and 1890s.
• Approximately 8 million Americans have been the subject of biographical sketches in collective biography volumes.
• The Library of Congress maintains a collection of more than 100,000 local histories.
• Local histories often contain information about an area's original settlers.

FAQ  TOP^

What is the Family & Local Histories Collection?
Family and local histories are an essential source of information for finding out what previous research has already been done for your ancestor, as well as adding new contextual information for your own research. The Family & Local Histories Collection includes more than 75 million names, 20,000 books, and 5.8 million images. When looking for an ancestor in these books, you may find family stories, facts, names, dates, and places. Such sources will save time in your research by eliminating the need to find clues regarding where to next search for your information. Authors usually include extracts of original documents, which you can then verify by going directly to the sources yourself.

The book pages in our collection are fully indexed and searchable, greatly enhancing the usefulness of this collection for researchers looking for specific names or events. You can view, save, and print your favorite article from these reference works.

What limitations exist in the search engine for family and local histories?
The pages in our family and local histories are fully indexed and searchable. The indexes for the Family & Local Histories Collection utilize Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology which automatically recognizes text within an image. Even though the text of a book's images may be too extensive to be manually indexed, this technology allows us to identify text within a complex image. The accuracy of this feature depends entirely on the quality of the image. If there are quality limitations to an image, the index search results for that image will not be as accurate. For this reason, you may find some results for images which do not contain the exact word for which you searched. Thank you for your patience with the slight limitations of this exciting technology.

For an excellent detailed description of OCR technology, click here.

How do I browse publications in the Family & Local Histories Collection?
You can browse the Family & Local Histories Collection by selecting a surname, place, or other term you wish to find. By clicking on the first letter of your word, a list of choices for two- or three-letter strings will appear beneath the list of single letters where you just clicked. Click on the two- or three-letter fragment with which your desired word begins. By following this procedure, the resulting list will be recalculated, showing titles that have the closest match to the word you have in mind. The words matching the letter combination you have chosen will appear as hypertext links, which you can click to go to the history you wish to view.

What are the data sources for the Family & Local Histories Collection?
The books and other documents in the Family & Local Histories Collection have been gathered from genealogical society collections from around the United States, as well as the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Widener Library (Harvard University), the New York Public Library, and the University of Illinois at Urbana.

• Search the largest online collection of family and local histories for your people and places of interest from the convenience of your own home.
• Browse the entire list of book titles by keyword, finding specific references more quickly.
• View detailed search results that link to full citations of each book.
• Save results to your My Ancestry page for future viewing.
• Print and download images of book pages.
• Use valuable tools to further your family history research and create a greater understanding of who your ancestors were.

How does the Family & Local Histories Collection compare to other online collections?
The Family & Local Histories Collection contains compiled records gathered from libraries across the United States. Compiled records are sometimes called secondary sources. Because the records were compiled by another author, it is very worthwhile to verify the accuracy of the stated facts in the history. The collection includes important clues for furthering your research and provides data by others who have done research you may not yet have found.

Do all databases in the Family & Local Histories Collection have images?
Not every database in the Family & Local Histories Collection is image-based. However, the majority of databases (over 99%) have images available for viewing. Those databases that include viewable images online will be indicated with an icon to the right of the database name.

Related Articles  TOP^

• Answers in an Autobiography by Louise Spears McCants Barry, Ph.D
• Tips for Finding Your Ancestors in Biographies by Kip Sperry
• Gems in Local Histories by Juliana Smith
• Collected Biography by David Thackery

• Genealogy's Best-Kept Secret: American Genealogical-Biographical Index by Kory L. Meyerink, AG, MLS
• The Dawes Commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1893-1914