Yesterday, while searching for a New England record, I stumbled on a website that is a terrific resource for anyone with early colonial New England roots and/or English ancestry.

First Settlers: Tracing Your Immigrant American Ancestor is a page that I definitely have bookmarked.

There are links to all kinds of genealogical resources and the great thing about this website is that the huge majority of them are to digitized versions of the books that Internet Archive has made available. The last row of links are to all kinds of digitized books relating to British history.

Instead of searching the Internet Archive database, books in each of the above categories already contain live links to all kinds of English records, British history, American colonial records and much more!

The First Settlers in America page has links to many New England records, of which the huge majority are also links to the Internet Archive digital library. There are also a handful of links to resources in New Jersey, New York, Indiana and Virginia.

The main website, Genealogy Village, was apparently launched in 2011 – the date of the last blog post – and has stagnated, but the First Settlers page has blossomed. I didn’t try every link, but I tried a number of them and every single one on the pages I’ve linked in this post work.

In short, this GeneaGem is a mini library, or maybe not such a mini library, of free, digitized genealogically-related books.

If you haven’t come across this website on your own, I’d highly recommend checking out my newest GeneaGem.

Try it, you’ll like it!