Palos Verdes California Family History Center/Facility Resources

Databases and Software
FHC Portal This center has access to the Family History Center Portal page which gives free access in the center to premium family history software and websites that generally charge for subscriptions.

Subscription websites
Many family history websites that usually need a paid subscription are available to search and use for free while visiting the center. Below is a list of these websites:

19th Century British Library Newspapers: This is a great database of British newspapers that have birth, marriage, and death information not found on familysearch.org or ancestry.com. It is useful if you have ancestors that lived in England.

19th Century US Newspapers: This is a great database of US newspapers that have birth, marriage, and death information not found on familysearch.org or ancestry.com. It is useful if you have ancestors that lived in the United States.

America - History and Life: This is a database of US Books, Academic Journals, Newspapers, and Magazines that can contain information about your ancestors that cannot be found on familysearch.org or ancestry.com. It is somewhat useful if you have ancestors that lived in the United States.

American Ancestors: This site is for US research, specifically New England. It is the website of the New England Historical Genealogical society. It has many records and databases that can only be found on this website. One of the most popular of these databases is The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. It is the flagship journal of American genealogy and the oldest in the field. A huge variety of genealogies and source material have been published in the Register for over 160 years, with an emphasis on New England. Authoritative compiled genealogies have always been a primary focus of the Register. It is very useful if you have ancestors that lived in the early American colonies or from New England. The American Civil War Research Database: This site doesn’t seem to have anything that ancestry.com doesn’t have. It is not much help if you have already searched the Civil War records on ancestry.com.

The American Civil War - Letters and Diaries: This site has letters, diaries, and memoirs from the civil war which can’t be found on any other site. It is very useful and sometimes you are able to find letters or diaries from your Civil War Veteran ancestors wrote. Images of the American Civil War: Photographs, Posters, and Ephemera from the Civil War

Ancestry.com: Largest set of worldwide family history databases including vital and civil registration births, marriages, deaths, divorces, passenger lists, census, naturalizations, church, cemetery, military, court, and land records, wills, directories, voting registers, family and local histories.

Arkiv Digital: Over 53 million Swedish Church Records with color images.

EmiWeb: An Internet-based archives about migration to and from Scandinavia.

FamNet: Online network for New Zealand roots.

FindMyPast.com: Worldwide record sets with emphasis on British and Irish records. Includes PERSI.

Fold3.com: This site mostly has records from the United States. One thing that sets this site apart from many of its others is the ability for users to contribute even more information. Members may annotate, or "footnote," existing web pages or even create their own web pages about history-related material. The material contributed can include text, pictures, or even video. If you have original source images of your own that you want to share with friends and family, simply upload them to Footnote and use the site's tools to make your information searchable and available to others. It is useful if you have ancestors that lived in the United States. Geneanet.org: Genealogy website in Continental Europe with 3 billion indexed individuals, 600,000 family trees, a powerful search engine and blog. Genline.com: 16th to 20th Century Swedish Church Records Online. Now available on Ancestry.com Historic Map Works: This site is a huge collection of maps consisting of over 100,000 cadastral, land ownership maps detailing the geographic and development history of the United States over several hundred years. They have rural and suburan areas, as well as cities and towns across America. There is also over 100,000 pages of illustrations from the present day and over 1,000 city directories related to the maps. They also have almost 100,000 maps from other parts of the world.

Historical Abstracts: This site covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. This site also has more than 2,300 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955. This site is not very helpful for genealogical research.

Images of the American Civil War: This site has thousands of images from the civil war that aren’t available on familysearch.org or ancestry.com. This site is useful if you have ancestors who served in the civil war.

JSTOR: This site is a collection of academic journals with letters and images corresponding to them. This site is useful for family history research because it gives online access to otherwise hard-to-find historical journals. Researchers sometimes learn about JSTOR entries by searching Google.

MyHeritage.com: 5 billion historical records. Helps you research your family history, build your family tree and add photos, and historical records. Includes a private family site for your family only. Newspapers.com: The largest online newspaper archive with millions of additional pages added every month.

Original Sources: This site is a collection of only original sources relating to World and US history, science, math, law, politics, philosophy, religion, literature, language, and social sciences. This site is not very helpful for genealogical research.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED): Most comprehensive dictionary in the world. Good for old terms for diseases and occupations. Paper Trail: This site is dedicated to research of pioneers. It has journals, histories, of pioneers headed west from 1800 to 1899. It is very useful if you have ancestors who crossed the plains whether they were Mormon Pioneers or not.

ProQuest Obituary Listings: This site is primarily for US research. This site more than 10 million obituaries and death notices published in newspapers from 1800 onward. It is very useful in finding death dates of your ancestors.

Social and Cultural History: Letters and diaries online.

SVAR:This site is strictly for research in Sweden. You also need to click the link and the top right hand corner to view the site in English. This website is the National Archives of Sweden. It has access to Birth records, Marriage records, Death records, Census records from the 1800s onward. It is very useful if you have ancestors from Sweden.

The Times (London): This is a digital archives of the London Times newspaper from 1785-1985. This newspaper contains birth, marriage, and death notices from all over England. This site is extremely useful if you have any ancestors from England. Digital archives of The Times newspaper in London, 1785-1985. Use password byu

Women and Social Movements in the United States: A resource of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000..

World Vital Records: This is now part of MyHeritage.com and contains records from all over the world. It has a few records that cannot be found anywhere else, but most of its records are on ancestry.com also. It has linked pedigrees useful for genealogy research.

Hardware and Equipment
The Center has :

Seven computers, providing Internet access,

1 Lexmark Printer/Copier/Scanner

one microfilm reader capable of viewing 35mm and 16mm film, and

one microfiche reader.