Search free records
The first year is also used as the birth year for Wikidata. A place narrows the newspaper search and puts matching records first.
Three free public archives are searchable here at once, from the Library of Congress, Open Archives and Wikidata: Chronicling America (US newspapers from the Library of Congress), Open Archives (civil and church records, mostly the Netherlands and Belgium) and Wikidata (open family links for people with a public record). No account and no card.
Ancestry's and FamilySearch's indexes are not here. FamilySearch's API “is now closed to the general public” and its terms forbid any software that would “scrape content, or to otherwise harvest”, and Ancestry's records are licensed to Ancestry. We link out to them with the name filled in instead of copying them.
What each source holds, and its limits
- Chronicling AmericaUS newspapers, 1756 to 1963, page by page. The text is machine-read from the scan and is often wrong, so read the page image before you trust a name or date. Pages over 95 years old are public domain.loc.gov
- Open ArchivesIndexed civil, church and notarial records from Dutch, Belgian and some German, French and Surinamese archives. Few US records. The index links to the archive that holds the original.openarchieven.nl
- WikidataOpen data (CC0) on 13.7 million people, with parents, spouses, children and birthplace where known. Mostly people with some public record. It is an index, not an original: follow its references.wikidata.org
Every search here is fetched by our server at each archive's published rate and kept for seven days, so a repeat search is instant. The archives see the search words, never your tree.
Newspaper search depends on the Library of Congress being reachable. When loc.gov is down or refuses us, that column says so and the other two still answer.