Free genealogy resources abound at the USGenWeb Project

December 13, 2009 | By Kimberly In Genealogy Site Reviews |

The USGenWeb Project is another wonderful free ancestry resource to tap into as you search for genealogy resources online. Their tagline is even “Land of the Free…Genealogy”! The USGenWeb Project is a large organization of a group of volunteers who maintain genealogy websites for each of the 50 states and each of the counties in the states!

Courtesy of Wikipedia.com

Those who volunteer to maintain an individual county or state website are called Coordinators. The Coordinator is responsible for updating and maintaining the website, collecting genealogical information that is submitted by website visitors and posting it online, answering questions from visitors, and so on. The county sites provide a wealth of local information you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. The county websites usually contain queries from those searching for ancestors, transcriptions of things like birth, death, and marriage records, maps, local histories, biographies of prominent residents, state census transcriptions, photographs, newspaper clippings, miscellaneous military records and much more. This is where you can really connect with people who know the County and it’s former residents well.

I used to be a County Coordinator with the USGenWeb Project several years ago and it was a wonderful experience. I love genealogy and building websites so it was a perfect match. I maintained the websites for one of the counties where I had ancestors as well as my home county where I grew up (although no ancestors lived there).

The USGenWeb Project also hosts several special projects that are also maintained by volunteers. A few of these projects are the USGenWeb Archives Project, Family Group Sheet Project, African American Griots Project, Tombstone Transcription Project, and several others. The Archives Projects is perhaps the largest in scale as it encompasses transcriptions done by volunteers of all sorts of vital records, census records, wills and other public documents. You will definitely want to check out the Archives Project. It is a really fabulous resource – all put together by volunteers who want you to have access to the information for free.

I highly recommend a visit to the USGenWeb Project if you haven’t yet checked it out. You may just find genealogy records here that you won’t find anywhere else online!