Ancestry

Ancestry Library Edition brings the world’s most popular consumer online genealogy resource to your library. It’s an unprecedented online collection of individuals from North America, the UK, Europe, Australia, and more.

Answers await everyone—whether professional or hobbyist, expert or novice, genealogist, or historian—inside the more than 7,000 available databases. Here, you can unlock the story of you with sources like censuses, vital records, immigration records, family histories, military records, court and legal documents, directories, photos, maps, and more.

And, with ongoing updates and new content always being added, you’ll keep coming back to discover more.

Learn more:

Key Differences between Ancestry Library Edition and Ancestry.com (Consumer Edition)

Ancestry LibGuide  – contains excellent research guides

Ancestry Video Tutorials  – in-depth courses for the serious genealogist

To find specific content:

Click the All Databases link on the homepage, then Browse Records by record type or alphabetical listing, or search the Database Card Catalog by keyword, record type, and more.

To find records in a specific province or country:

Click the Search tab at the top of the screen to browse by location, by name, or by using an interactive map.

To get all relevant names:

Use wildcards to cover all possible alternative forms and spellings.

Put ? or * at the middle or end of names, where you expect variations. Example—type Wil* Sm?th.

To see new content (added every week):

Click the List Recent link on the homepage.

To get more tips:

Click the Help link at the top right corner of any screen.

Popular and recently added collections include:

Canadian collections provide nearly 60 million records from the Census of Canada; and key vital records, such as the Drouin Collection (1621-1967), which includes nearly 30 million baptism, marriage, and burial records from Quebec.

U.S. collections deliver hundreds of millions of names from sources such as federal and U.S. censuses; birth, death, and marriage records including the Social Security Death Index; and U.S. border crossing and trans-ocean ship records.

U.K. collections offer censuses for England, Wales, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, and Scotland, with nearly 200 million records; Births and Baptisms (1834-1906), Marriage Licenses (1521-1869), Deaths and Burials (1834-1934), and Poor Law Records (1840-1938) in London; and more.

Other international collections continue to grow with more than 46 million records from German census, vital records, emigration indexes, ship lists, phone directories, and more; Chinese surnames in the large and growing Jiapu Collection of Chinese lineage books; Jewish family history records from Eastern Europe and Russia; and more.

Military collections deliver over 150 million records containing information often not found elsewhere; and includes records from the colonial to the Vietnam era.

Multimedia collections deliver millions of files ranging from family and gravestone photos to postcards and newsreels.

All this, plus an intuitive search interface, detailed search indexes, and helpful Learning Center tools, makes Ancestry Library Edition an indispensable resource for any library serving genealogists and historians.