The American Antiquarian Society has a very strong collection of published genealogical material focusing on early North American lines of descent. The collection numbers over 17,000 family histories, plus 2,000 genealogical reference works. The Society has a collection of Bibles, many with manuscript genealogical notes entered by family members. The Society also holds a collection of family trees and genealogical charts, including the Bechtel family tree pictured at right.
The American Antiquarian Society has nearly 7,000 directories published in the United States before 1877. The collection, one of the largest of its kind, includes most of the earliest directories printed in North America.
Access
The genealogies are fully cataloged online in the General Catalog using the Genre/Form term "genealogies". Adding other keywords or limiting by date or place of publication will generate a more manageable list.
City directories published before 1840 are fully cataloged online in the General Catalog using the genre term directories. For the period after 1840, access is available through the Society's annotated copy of the Dorothea N. Spear's Bibliography of American Directories Through 1860 (Worcester, Mass., 1961). A checklist of all pre-1876 directories, arranged alphabetically, by the name of the town or city, is available in the reading room. Directories published in the United States through 1880 are available on mircofiche in the Society's microform reading room.
Digital Resources
Genealogical information can be found in many of the digital resources available at AAS, especially the newspapers.
In the AAS reading room, access is provided to the following genealogical focused subscription databases:
- Ancestry
Ancestry provides access to census, military, birth, marriage and death records. - American Ancestors
Online repository for more than 1.4 billion searchable names from America and beyond. - America's Historical Newspapers
Millions of fully text-searchable issues.