Where to Find Free Genealogy Books

A great free genealogy resource that is often overlooked by family historians is out of copyright digitized books. These free genealogy books can be downloaded from a number of sources and can be incredibly useful for your research. So, here are some examples of great books to download followed by some sites where they can be accessed.

Examples of Free genealogy Books on the Internet Archive

If you haven’t used the Internet Archive to find genealogy books, to give you a taste of what’s available, here are examples of some British books I’ve downloaded for my own research:

• Foster, Joseph, ed. (1891-1892) Alumni Oxonienses: the members of the University of Oxford 1500-1714. Oxford: James Parker and Co Volume 1 – Early series This is one book of a five volume set which give short biographies of all the graduates of Oxford University between 1500 and 1886. There are also similar volumes for other universities on archive.org
• The Dentists Register (General Dental Council) 1889. This register (published every year) lists all the qualified and practicing dentists in Great Britain and gives their addresses, dates registered and qualified.
• Grant, Francis J., ed. (1906) The register of apprentices of the City of Edinburgh, 1583-1666. Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society A register of people apprenticed to merchants and craftsmen in Edinburgh between 1583 and 1666. There are registers for other years and other cities available.
• Clark, F. (1845) East-India Register and Army List for 1845. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co. The East India Company effectively ruled India during the height of the British Empire. This is a directory of British personnel and officers in their military wing. Other years are available.

Websites

Internet Archive

Go to the Internet Archive

Already mentioned above, the Internet Archive has millions of out of copyright books (and other media) that can be downloaded for free.

Google Books

Go to Google Books

Around 30 billion books and journals can be searched using Google Books. Out of copyright books (especially pre-20^th century), can be downloaded for free as pdfs. When searching for books I recommend using the Google Books search rather than the general web search to find books. Search for a name and narrow down using places and if anything has been written about your ancestors, then you should find it here.

Please also see my post about Google for other useful things they have for genealogists.

Project Gutenberg

Go to Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has over 57,000 free ebooks which can be downloaded in Kindle or epub format.

The Universal Digital Library

Go to UDL

This was a project started by the Carnegie Mellon University with the somewhat ambitious goal of digitizing every book ever written. Unfortunately the project came to an end in 2006. However, one million books were digitized and they can be searched or browsed on this website.

Wikibooks

Go to Wikibooks

These are open content textbooks that anyone can edit. There is a genealogy section.

Just Free Books

Go to Just Free Books

This site is a free ebooks search engine. It searches the content of more than 700 websites that offer free ebooks.

British History Online

Go to BHO

One of my favourite sites; British History Online contains digitized printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, focusing on the period between 1300 and 1800. Well worth a browse.

Family Search Books

Go to Family Search Books

Finally, don’t forget Family Search. The free database site has a huge online digital library with genealogy books from all over the world. This is an ever growing collection as more of their library gets digitized.

Please note that some books can’t be accessed online (those with protected access), but you can usually view them by visiting your local Family History Center. However, most books can be viewed online; you can focus your search to just the unrestricted books by selecting access level “Public”.

I hope you find these links useful.

Please see the Resources section for other useful things for genealogists.

For more great free resources see: 120 Free Genealogy Websites

Happy researching!

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