Underused Website Series: Digital Public Library of America
The Digital public library of America has a wealth of information with a click of your mouse.
As of the writing of this blog the main page says "Discover 34,425,540 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States"
Over 34 MILLION records, FREE, at your finger tips, in your pjs, drinking wine, morning, noon and night!!!
They even have a family research section (which is what we will focus on here)
Photos
162,609 results for family photo
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| DPLA Photos |
Here's a clip of some of the photos found on DPLA. There is a link in the description which takes you to a page with detailed information about the photo, (think citation)
Family Bibles
2,753 results for "family bible"
There's a family bible section with images from old family bibles. How cool is that??
Correspondence
3,485 results for Civil War AND family letter
Imagine fining a letter your ancestor wrote back home
Local Maps
75,920 results for county OR town OR city AND map
Looking for Sanborn fire maps--they are here. Old city maps, topo maps, flood maps,
Year books
22,777 results for school yearbook
Don't have a subscription to Ancestry to see the yearbooks, try DPLA
Military Records (includes Photographs and Service records)
15,027 results for soldier* OR regiment AND military
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| Civil war photographs |
103,641 results for "enlistment card" OR "draft card" OR "military service record"
A variety of military documents
Oral Histories
34,510 results for "oral history" interview
Various oral histories from all overFamily History and Genealogy books
350,466 results for genealogy
tons of books to peruse about genealogy (family histories, phone book listings, wills, more photos, cemeteries)
And I even found a video library with videos on using DPLA for family research, making gifs and a sundry of other videos.
We have just scratched the surface of this website. I can see me spending hours and hours just scrolling thru the vast amounts of reference material and information on this site.... and its FREE!! Book mark the website DP.LA (yes thats the website address)
Dont forget to read the Terms of Service
Happy Hunting!!
P.S. just did a search for Newspapers in the regular search box (not on the family search tab) and here's what came up over 1 MILLION newspapers!!!
Great post - certainly a rich resource :)
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