10 Places to Search for Free Family History Books Online

Looking for books about your family history?

In this post, find out which digital libraries are best for finding free family history books about your ancestors!

What is a Digital Library

You’ve probably already used a digital library of some sort without even realizing it. For instance, if you’ve downloaded a book from Amazon to your Kindle, you’ve accessed a digital book library. If you’ve watched a movie on Netflix, you’ve used a digital video library. If you’ve looked at Sanborn Maps at the Library of Congress, you’ve accessed a digital map library.

Digital libraries can come in many shapes and sizes. According to Wikipedia:

A digital library, digital repository, or digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection.

*For this article, we will be specifically referring to digital libraries that contain books.

Simply put, a digital library is a collection of books that have been scanned, digitally preserved, and are accessible through an internet portal or website.

Benefits of Digital Libraries

Family history books from digital libraries have provided clues and information that I may never have found anywhere else. These books have been crucial not only for proving lineages for clients but for my personal research, as well.

Here are a few of the benefits of using digital libraries to find family history books:

• Access to sources that may not see in your everyday research. You might see a few digital books in your research at Ancestry, but probably not very many. Digital libraries will take you out of your “genealogy comfort zone” and into different sources.
• Fill in the gaps between census and vital records. What happened in between those 10-year censuses? Information from family history books can help fill in the gaps.
• Books can provide social context. Even if we find information about our ancestors that we don’t like or want to know, the stories in digital books can give social context to our ancestors’ lives. Genealogy isn’t just about names and dates; it’s about what happened “in the dash.”
• Always open and no need to leave home to use them. With many brick-and-mortar libraries still closed due to COVID-19, digital libraries are an excellent alternative. Plus, you can access great content in your pajamas, day or night, from the comfort of your couch!

Digital Libraries: Family History

When you start your search in digital libraries, you may want to begin with these repositories. They are specifically focused on content for family history research.

FamilySearch Digital Library

The FamilySearch Digital Library contains more than 440,000 digitized genealogy and family history books and publications from the archives of family history libraries such as the Allen County Public Library, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and others.

Included in the collection are family histories, county, and local histories, genealogy magazines and how-to books, gazetteers, medieval histories, and pedigrees. While some books are only viewable in a Family History Center, many can be viewed from – as well as downloaded to – your home computer.

To access the FamilySearch Digital Library from within FamilySearch, click “Search” in the top menu, and select “Books” from the drop-down menu.

On the home page of the digital library, you will see a simple search bar. Type in a surname, historical event, group of people, or place name. You may see several prompts appear below the search bar, but you do not have to select one. A search will cover every word of text.

The FamilySearch Digital Library is free to use, but you must create a (free) FamilySearch account and sign in to view the images.

Genealogy Gophers™

Genealogy Gophers™ offers access to more than 80,000 digitized family histories, regional and local histories, genealogy magazines, how-to books, gazetteers, newsletters, and medieval histories through a partnership with FamilySearch, The Internet Archive, and other free book sources on the Internet.

What makes Genealogy Gophers™ different from the other digital libraries is their search technology, developed specifically for “identifying real people named in genealogy books.” In other words, their search engine focuses on people, along with their names, dates, and places.

While technically free to use, Genealogy Gophers™ is a small operation, and hosting a website is expensive. You can see 3 books a week for free, and after that, they ask for a small donation to help defray the hosting costs: $3 for a month or $20 for a year.

HeritageQuest® Online

If you’ve been around the genealogy web world for a while, you might remember HeritageQuest as one of the first websites where researchers could access census and Revolutionary War pension records for free. HeritageQuest® Online is now “Powered by Ancestry® and has undergone many changes in the past few decades, but you can still find great content, free of charge… if you know how to access it.

Many libraries offer access to HeritageQuest® Online, and some even offer remote access to their patrons. I picked up a Los Angeles Public Library card a few years ago, and while I almost never get to one of their branches (especially now that they’re all closed due to COVID-19), I can use HeritageQuest® Online and several other databases for free from the comfort of home.

HeritageQuest® Online‘s collection of books includes over 22,000 family and local histories, compiled genealogies, documentary collections, church records, military records, vital records, city and county histories, and more. They also offer a collection of City Directories with over 1.5 million records from various U.S. city and county directories from 1821—1989.

It is definitely worth the effort to get your hands on a library card so you can access this digital library!

Digital Libraries: General

These repositories were not designed with family historians in mind, but they should definitely not be overlooked.

Google Books

In 2015, Google Books claimed to have digitized over 25 million books. Sadly, the project slowed down at that point due to legal issues, and the current number of books is unknown.

You can search for books on Google Books or from the Google.com search page. If you use the latter, be sure to narrow your results by selecting “Books” from the “More” menu. If a book with content matching your search criteria is found, a link will show up in your search results.

If a book is out of copyright or the publisher has given permission, you will be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire book. Otherwise, you will see a limited preview, snippet view, or no preview at all. If a book is in the public domain, you can download a PDF copy to your computer.

You will also find links to where you can buy the book or borrow it from a library via WorldCat.

With a free Google account, you can add the books you’ve found to your personal library for later reference.

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library containing millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Today, the Internet Archive contains over 21 million downloadable books and texts, as well as 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free account.

Look for family, county, and local histories, yearbooks, census records, newspapers, magazines, and even contemporary genealogy how-to books. Books on the Internet Archive are offered in many formats, including DAISY files for print-disabled people. The Internet Archive accepts contributions of digital materials from the community.

To browse or search specifically for genealogy books, visit The Archive’s Genealogy Resources page.

Note: There are numerous ways to search the Internet Archive. Please see this Guide for help with searching the Internet Archive.

HathiTrust Digital Library

HathiTrust (pronounced “haw tea”) is a partnership of academic and research institutions offering a collection of over 17 million titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Books that are either uncopyrightable (i.e., some government works) or in the public domain can be searched and viewed in their entirety. Books that are still in copyright are considered “limited,” and can be searched but not viewed, allowing you to decide whether or not to obtain a copy of the book from another source.

You can download PDF copies of individual pages of books, but you will need to log in as a member of a HathiTrust Partner Institution.

To browse or search specifically for genealogy books, visit HathiTrust’s Ancestry and Genealogy collection. This is a very small subsection of HathiTrust, so don’t stop your search here. Be sure to search the main collection, as well.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg offers access to over 60,000 free eBooks that you can download or read online. You will find much of the world’s great literature, with a focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.

There is no fee or registration required, and no special apps are needed to read the books. Scanning and digitizing is done by volunteers, so donations are gladly accepted to help defray costs.

Aggregators

If you cannot find what you are looking for at a specific digital library, try your search at an aggregate site. These sites can search multiple digital repositories at one time.

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an all-digital library that aggregates metadata — or information describing an item — and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

World Digital Library

Launched in 2009, the World Digital Library (WDL) was a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, with the support of UNESCO, and contributions from libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations around the world. Look for books, manuscripts, and other primary materials that are presented in their original languages.

Open Library

Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive. To date, they have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way. Open Library is an “open” project that welcomes your contributions; you can fix typos in texts, add books, and offer technical assistance.

Tips for Searching in Digital Libraries

Now that you have a few ideas of where to look for books about your ancestors, here are a few tips to make your searches more productive.

• Start with a broad search, especially for uncommon names and places. For example, when I’m searching for my Stonecypher ancestors, I typically don’t need to add any other identifiers because it isn’t a very common name.
• Think of searching as an inverted pyramid and narrow your search with additional identifiers. When searching for common names, narrow your search with additional identifiers like a first name, dates, or locations.
• If the website you are using has a search guide or tips, read them. There may be multiple methods of searching within a digital library, and you’ll get better results if you know what they are.
• Try a wildcard search. Wildcards, such as ? or *, take the place of one or more characters in a search term. They can be very helpful when searching for variant spellings of names. How to do a wildcard search can vary from website to website, so be sure to check the digital library’s search guidelines to learn the correct method.
• Search in multiple digital libraries. One library may have a limited – or no – version of a book, while another library may have the entire book available for viewing and downloading.
• Check the filenames when you download a book. More often than not, books that are downloaded from a digital library come with a name that looks like gibberish. Give your downloaded book a meaningful name. I typically use the actual name of the book along with the page number where I found the information and any other useful information. For example, I found information about Henry Stonecipher on page 487 of The Stonecipher Tree by Mary Howe Underwood (1924), so I named the downloaded file “The-Stonecipher-Tree-p487-Henrys-Family.pdf.” But use a system that works for you.
• Save your digital books in a folder where you can find them again. I used to save all of my downloaded books to the same folder, but I found that I rarely went back to look at them. Now, if the book pertains to a specific ancestor, I put it in the folder with other documents for that ancestor. If the book pertains to a place or event, I keep a separate folder for those items.

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