If you have been doing family history for a while, chances are good you’re familiar with the big genealogy companies, such as FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, Geneanet, etc. However, there are literally thousands of other family history databases on the internet, and The Family History Guide has just-in-time links to many of the most useful ones. You can find them in the various country pages of the website, including state and province pages.

Let’s take a look at five of these databases that can help you with your research, in various places around the world. (This is a random sampling of databases in The Family History Guide, not based on size or ranking in any way.)

Global

• David Rumsey Map Collection—”The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 35 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps.”

United States

• Immigrant Ships—This site contains 21 volumes of transcriptions of passenger and crew records for immigrant ships that arrived in the United States, as well as several other countries. You can search by date, ship name, port of departure, and port of arrival. Additional links are provided to other sites with helpful passenger list information.

England

• FreeBMD—The Free Birth, Marriage, and Death records site (FreeBMD) has large collections of searchable records for England and Wales. The records total over 282 million, and they span the years from 1837 through 1997. Record transcription by volunteers is still underway for this time period.

Canada

• Canadian Headstone Project—This site contains nearly 2 million entries, including photographs and headstone transcriptions from cemeteries throughout Canada. You can search by a person’s first or last name, do cemetery lookups, and submit information to add to the site collection.

Norway

• Digital Archive of Norway—You can search this site for property and land registrations in Norway, as well as historical photos.  There are also some help articles for Norwegian genealogy on the main page here: https://www.arkivverket.no/slektsgranskning