Looking beyond Ancestry and FamilySearch indexes

They have tons of stuff, but not everything!

One mistake I see people make a lot when they start getting into genealogical research is overlooking sources that don’t come up when you search for a person on Ancestry or FamilySearch. While these types of sites have tons of useful records you should definitely dig into, they don’t have everything. Here are some of my favorite online, non-Ancestry-or-FS sources that I think everyone should know about. Some are specific to my area of interest, others are not. This list is in no way exhaustive! Feel free to comment with others you think are worth knowing about. :-)

1. Academic articles. My favorite. By this I mean peer-reviewed, published work in academic journals. You can find these by searching JSTOR and other similar journal databases. If you don’t have access yourself, a library near you certainly does—particularly if you live near any institution of higher learning (community college counts, too!) I still am able to use my university’s access to JSTOR from my house and I graduated over ten years ago. No, you are almost certainly not going to find an article written about your fifth great grandmother specifically. What you can find is a wealth of information about the time and place she lived in, if you look for that, and that often includes mentions of people you may be looking for. People with PhDs in history research everything, and forgive me for saying that their work is almost always of a higher caliber than what I typically find in genealogy-specific journals. On top of that, they cite all their sources, always. This is a shortcut to figuring out where records that may be of interest to you are; these people know where to look and have the funding to do so. Piggyback off their work and profit. :-) The Louisiana State Historical Society also maintains an online archive of past articles published in their journal that I have found tons of great stuff in. Look at the sources these authors are citing and go to them directly!

2. In a similar vein—masters’ and PhD theses are often published on the university’s website and can be about anything. Tulane has an archive here, for example. The benefits of using these as sources are basically the same as the above. Scholars at universities in your area of interest are most likely to be working on stuff you’re interested in—they need access to the same repositories you do to do their work.

3. Public land records. The federal Bureau of Land Management has a database. So does the state of Louisiana. You can find the original owners of land parcels and see who they were sold to. Helps to figure out where exactly your ancestors lived and who lived nearby.

4. I often find it useful to compare public land records I have found on the above sites to plat maps so I can figure out where the heck “section 7, range 8, township 9” or whatever actually is. Terrebonne Parish has a website for this. Many counties/parishes do if you search Google for “[parish name] plat map”.

5. The Archdiocese of New Orleans has published all their church records up to 1815 online.

6. The Archdiocese of Baton Rouge has (many of) their records abstracted and available as e-books. They’re pretty cheap and super useful.

7. The Terrebonne Parish Genealogical Society has published abstracts of early conveyance records online. Still impatiently awaiting the day that all of the parish records are digitized on FS but until then, these abstracts are often useful if you can’t make it to the courthouse. Often genealogical societies like this one will publish all kinds of records like this. Their periodicals are worth perusing, too, although they aren’t always available online. Local libraries will have them, and you can purchase them directly in a lot of cases from the organization.

8. I have written about this before, but GOOGLE! Google your ancestor’s name in quotes “like this” + wherever they lived if the name alone is too broad to yield useful results. If you have a cousin who is insane like I am and spends way too much time on this and they have a blog, you will probably find their writing! Also you will get hits from places like the old forums at genealogy.com. These forums are defunct; no longer active. But they contain a goldmine of information posted 10-20 years ago by people who were doing genealogical research before it was easy. I often find posts made by cousins who have since passed. They can have valuable insights and point you in new directions.

9. Newspaper archives. The main ones I use are newspapers.com (paid), Chronicling America (free), and GenealogyBank (paid). GenealogyBank’s archives are indexed and come up in FamilySearch results, but you can only see the actual newspapers if you pay for a subscription. Ancestry has a similar setup with newspapers.com. I have found that GenealogyBank does have several newspapers of interest for me that aren’t on newspapers.com. Chronicling America is great because it’s free, but the indexing on there kind of sucks compared to what is on newspapers.com so you might not be able to find what you want unless you already know where to look. It’s good to check as many sites as you’re able to because you never know if one site may have correctly indexed what you are looking for and give results, while another site that has the same newspaper digitized won’t pull anything up because their indexing isn’t as good for that particular search query. That goes for the census, too—always search on both Ancestry AND FS. Just because a query yields no results, doesn’t mean the people aren’t on the census, either—sometimes you need to go line by line or find a neighbor whose name does get pulled up, then look around them to find your people. Especially if your family is full of unique and/or non-English names.

10. There’s a statewide index online for birth, marriage, and death records in Louisiana that are old enough to be public. This includes birth records over 100 years ago, death records over 50 years ago, and marriage records from Orleans Parish only. One caveat: if the record only recently became public (say, someone was born in 1923 and it’s 2024 now), their name may not come up in this index. I don’t think it’s updated regularly. Request the record anyways, print out the blank form and fill it in. Or just write the information the form asks for on a piece of paper and send it in with your $5 check. They’ll send you the record if it exists! This was the case for my great grandfather’s birth record; he’s not in this index but I got his birth certificate the same way. :-)

11. There’s also a statewide eClerks portal. This site has an index of the parish records from a lot of parishes, although not all. You can search for names and see available records for them and where those records are held. Sometimes you can see the records online by going to the specific parish’s eClerks instance, although it costs $20 for a day pass to get into most of those. You can also just use the eClerks portal to see where the records are then go in person and avoid paying the $20. Again, they don’t have everything, but some parishes have been very thorough in digitizing their records. Sadly, not Terrebonne (yet?) But Lafourche Parish, for example, has all of their records available in eClerks. These aren’t on FamilySearch yet, either.

Ancestry and FS are amazing resources, but don’t let the easy availability of searchable indices on a few big sites lead you to think that that’s all there is out there! Sources can be found everywhere, and if you only ever look at the same websites that everyone else looks at you probably won’t ever find anything new. :-) Happy hunting!