Helps for reading Handwriting

Here are some web sites that will be helpful to learn to read old handwriting.

Early American Handwriting Quiz
This quiz will test your skills at identifying upper and lower case letters.

How to Read 18th Century British-American Handwriting
This is a guide to reading 18th century handwriting with sample images.

Script Tutorials
Tutorials for reading English, German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese handwriting

Palaeography - Reading Old Handwriting 1500-1800
An online tutorial from the UK National Archvies

Newspaper Digitization Projects

International Coalition on Newspapers
Links to international newspaper digitization projects listed alphabetically by country.

United States Newspaper Digitization Projects
Links to U.S. newspaper digitization projects, sites with national coverage as well as state or regional projects.

This page highlights and links to past, present, and prospective digitization projects of historic newspapers. The focus is primarily on digital conversion efforts, not full-text collections of current news sources.

Free Access to Newspapers at Footnote.com this month

Justin@Footnote.com just posted -- For the month of May all the historical newspapers on Footnote.com will be open to the public. A free registration is needed to view the images.

To access the newspaper collections visit www.footnote.com/newspapers.

On Footnote you will find newspapers ranging from small towns to major cities and dating back to the 1700’s. Whether a historian or a genealogists, historical newspapers are one of the best resources that provide a unique window into the past.

300 Million Names and New Tools Help Genealogists

Press Release from FamilySearch:

FamilySearch International announced today that it has posted an additional 300 million names to its huge family history database. The names come from extracted original sources and include many collections that have never before been available online. The move bolsters FamilySearch's earlier announcements regarding ongoing efforts to digitize the billions of genealogical records stored in its Granite Mountain Records Vault near Salt Lake City, Utah.

The names can be found on the beta.familysearch.org Web site. That site and several other online tools and resources, can be accessed at labs.familysearch.org. FamilySearch intends to migrate these resources to its main FamilySearch.org Web site later this year.

Links to the National Archives Web site

Here are links to some of the sections of the National Archives Web site that I use often:


List of NARA records digitized by Ancestry.com and Footnote.com

Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States
Each chapter in this guide covers a record group at the National Archives.

Search NARA Microfilm Catalog

NARA Online Publications

New Microfilm Publications Issued

Citing Records at the National Archives

ProGenealogists Online Links

Click on the links below for a list of Web sites thatProGenealogists use daily when conducting genealogy research. These are all searchable online databases or informative tools.

United States Genealogy Sleuth

International Genealogy Sleuth

Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic Books Online

Readers worldwide have free access to nearly 60,000 books from the LOC collection.

These and the other digitized books can be accessed through the Library’s catalog Web site and the Internet Archive (IA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free online digital library.

Click here to see an article about the digitized collection.