AccessGenealogy

Photo by Sam Albury on Unsplash

​Are you busy getting ready for the holidays or planning winter getaways?  Or perhaps thinking about what you will do this coming year to further your family research and family story.  Since December tends to be a busy month, I thought I’d share a site that will help trigger new research venues and sites to explore.  Let’s look.

Access Genealogy is a website that has gathered a plethora of free genealogy resources in one place.  As you know the list of online resources continues to grow.  Great sites like Cindy’s List continued to add and build.  I thought it might be fun to add one more resource, Access Genealogy, to your list.

According to the site: “…we provide sources for birth records, death records, marriage records, census records, tax records, church records, court records, military records, historical newspapers, cemeteries, and ethnic records. We also provide some historical details about different times and people in America’s history. Our specialty, however, is Native American genealogy and research”. AccessGenealogy.com is one of the largest collections of free genealogy, emphasis on United States Research.  As noted from their site, Native American genealogy is their specialty which I think is unique and will be helpful to those whose roots lay there.

How to use the site?
You can search by a couple of means:  Location (by state) or by the categories listed on their site (Black Genealogy, Cemetery Records, Census Records, Databases, DNA, Military Records, Native American, and Vital Records)
 
In addition to the usual records, you’ll find histories and similar materials that will be helpful to research or understand what was happening in an area. If you view North Dakota Genealogy, you can see databases such as North Dakota Biographies, North Dakota Census, North Dakota Immigration Records and North Dakota Land Records to name a few.  Some of these are indexes or provide links to other sites for additional information. And there are several links related to Native American research.

I chose to look at the North Dakota Genealogy and then searched for “Grafton, North Dakota”.  The results varied from County Courthouse addresses to 1st North Dakota Volunteers to some military unit in Ohio.  So not exactly what I’d expected but interesting. 
There is a note of caution about the “Databases” stored on their site.  These are not searchable using their search engine.  So, I thought I’d try out how one would “search” one of these databases.  I chose the “Georgia Marriage Collection”> Baldwin County Georgia Marriages 1806-1850> Search using the search within the database.  A quick search of the name “Sullivan” brought up two results.  I think these databases will be especially helpful when exploring a part of the country that you’re not as familiar with researching.

If you need a little break from shopping, baking or other holiday merriment, check out this site.  While it didn’t provide a list of other large genealogy sites that I was expecting, it captures databases and unique indexes and listings for topics in each state that you might not find as easily in some of the major sites. 

They continue to add information and you do have the opportunity to be notified via email.  However, they caution that you might be informed more than once a day as this site continues to grow.  Regardless of what you choose to do, I hope you will find it an interesting source for records and take some time to do some genealogy—whether on this site or another.