A wealth of genealogical material is available free from the Internet Archive website.
Most of it is listed under "Additional Collections," then going to "Genealogy," at www.archive.org/details/additional_collections, including the U.S. Census, 1790 to 1930. Scanned from the Allen County Public Library's microfilm holdings from the National Archives, this set also includes the Indian census of the U.S., 1885-1940.
Each census "collection" has a scope and contents note, reminding us what a specific census year covered. Individual states are listed at the bottom of the page, and each state is divided into counties, with reel numbers given.
Unfortunately, the search box at the top of the page does not search these census pages, but this is an excellent way to browse a particular area or search for a specific citation. You can read the census online or you can download a PDF of it.
The Internet Archive also includes passenger and crew lists for vessels arriving in New York City (1897-1957) and passenger lists of vessels arriving at Baltimore and Philadelphia.
The Passport Applications Collection, 1795-1905, also was contributed by the Allen County Public Library. There is a collection of available books under "Family Genealogies" and a collection called "Family History Library" composed of digitized books from the Brigham Young University Family History Library.
A search box is at the top of every page. If items you seek don't appear, rethink your search. There is a good chance you will find what you want or at the very least something else of interest. While a lot of this material can be found on other major sites, here it is free. They also have a large number of published books scanned in.
Newspapers at the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has a wonderful online directory of newspapers from 1690 to 2010 that easily can be searched at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles.
Not only does it search by state, but also county and cities. After finding the title that you need, it also will show the complete holdings locations where you may view those papers.
If you are doing research from 1860 to 1922 in Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, many of these papers are available to read online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages. The search engine is amazingly easy to use to find exactly what you are looking for.
Agricultural census
If you go to the U. S. agricultural census taken from 1850 through 1880 for information on land-owning farmers, you also should check for information on others.
Many people such as city dwellers are included, even though they did not own a farm, because they owned horses or other animals. It might help you document someone you otherwise have nothing else on.
The microfilm of this census schedule and other nonpopulation ones, like manufacturing and social statistics, can be found at the Georgia Archives and other libraries.
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