FREE AGENTS
Annual costs of membership to subscription genealogy sites can add up. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll sneak up on several free collections for nonsubscribing visitors. Some include indexed images, and others have indexes that link to images (sometimes free, sometimes fee based) at other websites.
We’ve gone undercover and scoured the web to find the paid sites’ most useful free collections. Some have a narrow focus—such as a single city—while others contain millions of records. Several are free to search on multiple sites.
In making our selections, we prioritized collections that connect you to digital record images or record transcriptions, but several handy index-only collections are included as well. In most cases, you’ll need to register or log in with a free account on the subscription website to access the databases (and especially any associated images). See page 42 for passageways to access each site’s collections.
I SPY US GENEALOGY RECORDS
1880 US Census
FindMyPast
<search.findmypast.com/search-world-Records/us-census-1880>
The 1880 US census was the first to include individuals’ relationships to the head of household. The census forms also provide each person’s name, sex, race, marital status, birthplace, parents’ birthplaces, occupation and more. Search results link to record images.
1940 US Census
FindMyPast
<www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2442>
The most recent extant US census is
