Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Research Freebies Online: Internet Text Archive

There are many free research sites on the Internet featuring digital images of maps, source documents and hard to find books. One such site is the Internet Text Archive, a part of the massive Internet Archive site. More than 1,301,000 items are digitized in this text archive. To get the most out of this site use the advanced search engine where you can search among various fields including title, author, description, custom fields and dates. Be sure to select text in the media type field. I found several hard to find books in this massive collection including the 584-page Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State by the Federal Writers Project from 1938. In searching for the word Mississippi in a title search I came across several wonderful 19th century volumes including several Mississippi histories and first-hand accounts of life in the state. A search of the term genealogy produced over 7,700 results.

With your research using the Internet, don’t forget the Internet Text Archive. It will be time well spent.
 

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