
The Internet Archive is a valuable yet often overlooked resource for genealogists. This online digital library offers access to a vast collection of digitized books, records, and other materials that can greatly enhance your research. This guide will walk you through the steps to effectively use the Internet Archive in your genealogy research.
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What is the Internet Archive?
The Internet Archive is a non-profit, Web-based, digital library offering storage of, and access to, digitized materials. These materials include archived websites, books, videos, images, audio files and more. The Internet Archive can be accessed at https://www.archive.org. In addition, the Internet Archive offers The Wayback Machine allowing users to view archived versions of websites that might contain genealogical information, such as old family websites or online databases that are no longer active.
The Internet Archive is important to genealogy research for several reasons:
- Most of the items are in the public domain, meaning they can be freely used and copied.
- Many genealogy books and even microfilm images of census sheets and more are available.
- These resources are available to the public for free.
Internet Archive components
- The Wayback Machine
- Books and Texts
- Audio and Video
The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/web/web.php) is an archive of how website pages appeared at certain time periods. When the Internet first started, no one thought it would be important or of value to archive such information. However, having a “snapshot” of what a website looked like is actually valuable for many types of research.
- Enter a website address or URL in the search field and click Take Me Back.
- A timeline appears for that website with dates on which a “snapshot” was taken. Click on a date to view the snapshot.
Save Page Now (https://web.archive.org/save/) is a feature allowing a researcher to archive any webpage. This is useful for source citations of online records since it creates a permanent link to a specific webpage.
Books / eBooks and Texts
Of all the collections at Internet Archive, Books and Texts have the most relevant items for genealogists and family historians.
The Books collection contains almost 8 million books in digital form. On the Menu Bar, select Books. Then under Featured, select All Books.
- The Book Archive page appears.
- In the Search field enter your keyword(s) and click Go.
The Text collection contains almost 42 million documents. On the Menu Bar, select Books. Then under Featured, select All Texts.
- The eBooks and Texts page appears.
- In the Search field enter your keyword(s) and click Go.
Video and Audio
There are over 12 million video items and almost 14 million audio recordings at Internet Archive.
- On the Menu Bar, select Video or Audio. Then under Featured select either All Video or All Audio.
- In the Search field enter your keyword(s) and click Go.
Search methods
- Keyword search: Enter names, locations, or events related to your ancestor in the search bar. For example, you might search for "David Putman genealogy" or "New York City 1881 immigration."
- Filters: After performing a search, use the filters on the left side of the page to narrow down results by media type (e.g., texts, images, audio), date, language, and more.
- Advanced search: Click on "Search text contents" under the search bar to open the advanced search.
- Specific fields: Use specific fields like "Title," "Creator," "Publisher," etc., to narrow down your search. For instance, searching within the "Title" field can help you find specific books or documents related to a surname.
- Boolean operators: Use operators like AND, OR, and NOT to refine your search results. For example, "David Putman AND genealogy" will find resources that mention both terms.
Downloading content
There is an extensive FAQ (“frequently asked questions”) section about searching and downloading files (https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-download-files/). Here are some tips:
- Once you’ve located a text, on the left sidebar are links labeled View.
- The most common text formats are included such as PDF, EPUB or for e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle.
- Read Online displays a viewer that allows you to “flip” pages, zoom in on content and even search within the book.
- The viewer also allows you to share the book via social media with others and even “listen” to an audio reading of the book.
- A PDF format is available for most texts, but it will take a long time to download depending upon your Internet access speed and the size of the book.
- Right-click over the PDF link, select Save Link As, and save the PDF to your computer. Then open the PDF for viewing.
- The Full Text format will download a small .txt formatted file but with lots of extraneous coding.
- The Full Text format is the quickest to download and easiest to search, but lacks structure, pagination, and other conveniences.
Genealogy collection

Access the Genealogy Collection containing over 42,000 items (https://www.archive.org/details/genealogy). Items include:
- Several sets of US Federal Census forms and other censuses.
- Birth, marriage, and death records on microfilm via Reclaim the Records (https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/).
- Genealogy books and journals from the Allen County Public Library, the National Library of Scotland and the Boston Public Library.
- Almost 2,000 compiled family genealogies.
Saving and organizing research
- Create a free account: By creating a free Internet Archive account, you can save items to your collections, bookmark pages, and make notes.
- Save links: When you find a valuable resource, save the link or download a copy for future reference
Tips

- The Wayback Machine can be used to find those “broken links” and pages that no longer seem to exist. When encountering a "404 page error," copy the link, search The Wayback Machine and then click links on the timeline until finding the archived webpage.
- Not every webpage has been archived to The Wayback Machine. While Internet Archive does a good job of taking periodic snapshots of web pages, it only does so for important or top-level pages. Often, sub-pages are not included.
- Search broad then go narrow. Even when working with common surnames or place names, do a broad search and then review the results. Next add unique words or qualifiers such as “genealogy” or dates.
- Not all content is searchable. While many texts have been “OCRd” meaning the image has been converted to text, not all books or documents have been processed. You may have to browse through the pages of a text.
- Search by collection. When reviewing search results, look in the sidebar on the right and use one of the Collection links displayed. Also keep scrolling down to use the Related Collections links.
- Use Google to search the Internet Archive. Preface your search with “site:archive.org” in Google and only those results found at Internet Archive will be displayed.