Today’s post is short and sweet and
about free family history books online.

Family History Books (books.familysearch.org) contains more than 200,000 digitized genealogy, family history, and local history publications available from around the world. “The collection includes family histories, county and local histories, genealogy magazines and how-to books, gazetteers, and medieval histories and pedigrees.” The titles included in the Family History Books collection come from the following partner institutions:

Free Family History Books Online

Family History Library stacks (Courtesy stephendanko.com/blog)

You can access Family History Books from FamilySearch.org as follows:

1. Through the Books Tab

  • A. Go to https://familysearch.org/. Click on the Books tab as shown at the top of this post.
  • B. Type in your search criteria in the search box.

Tips: Using the Books tab to search available Family History Books lets you filter the search using the left navigation menu.

However, the “search within books” function does not differentiate between books that are currently online and those that are scheduled to be made available online. Books that are not yet online generate an error message and cannot be opened.

2. Through the FamilySearch Catalog

  • A. Click on the Catalog tab of the FamilySearch website.
  • B. Click Titles from the menu.  If you do not know the title of the book, you can also search by Keyword.
  • C. Enter search criteria in the title of keyword box.
  • D. Search Results then displays and click on the title you want.
  • E. Book details page opens.
  • F. Click on the link to go to the digital book.

Great resources – don’t overlook free family history books online in your research!