USGenWeb is a free volunteer project!
- Volunteer project providing
genealogy help.
- US based, providing a range of
genealogy links.
- Organisation is by country and
state.
- Volunteer on a range of volunteer
projects to in the USGenWeb Project Directory.
- Every state is broken down into
regions and towns and means you can search data by
specific geographical region.
- Search Archive Project, Marriage
Records, Church Records and more.
- Digital Map Library allows you to
see what your hometown used to look like!
- Hosted and supported by
Ancestry.com.
- Excellent search engine.
- A vast quantity of research support
materials and helpful guides.
USGenWeb is a fantastic volunteer
project that aims to open up US genealogical information
to the wider public for free. The project is,
unsurprisingly, a little rough around the edges, but we
have an awful lot of admiration for these guys as they
have succeeded in compiling a vast amount of useful
genealogical information and providing it all for free.
The site is focussed solely on US users and only provides
information relating to US genealogy, so we would advise
all those who aren't interested in researching their
history through US records to look at other
free or voluntary projects.
USGenWeb is organised into a number of different
subsidiary sites, each devoted to information and records
sourced from a particular US State. The records held in
each state site are different, though most sites provide
information pertaining to Birth, Marriage and Death and
state Census materials. A number of unusual records are
also located in the sites belonging to some states, such
as immigration records and justice records. We are really
impressed by the quality of information that is provided
by a volunteer site such as USGenWeb. Searching
state-by-state evidence is really simple, meaning users (providing their evidence is located in just one state's
records), can find record information easily.
The one problem with USGenWeb is that all the evidence is
spread across a number of smaller subsidiary sites. This
means that just one search will not cover
all the records. The difficulty with this is that many
users may not know the state of origin, residence,
marriage or death of the person that they are
researching, or knows that they will feature in a number
of records. Although the organisational quality of this
site is to be commended, especially as it is a volunteer
organisation, we do think that this organisation can be a
little limiting in certain cases. It's also a little
jarring to have to open and search through so many pages
in the course of your research with USGenWeb, and we
definitely feel it would be easier to search records if
they were held centrally on one site.
We are still however impressed with what the guys at
USGenWeb have achieved through recruiting volunteers and
working entirely for free. If it seems like it might be
useful to you, we would still recommend checking it out.
After all, it is free! Hit the link below to see what
USGenWeb has to offer!
Click the button below to check out USGenWeb.com for yourself...
