Kentucky
Kentucky
It takes a good tracker (think Daniel Boone!) to find the rich collection of digital materials available for Kentucky.
You won't find a lot of digital archived material at the website of the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Instead, the site offers an e-archives section where you can search for a wide variety of state government documents and records, including Civil War era pension records.
The search results tell you where the documents are filed and you can then order a copy, for a fee, from KDLA. Just don't expect to pull up a PDF of the record online. Ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the KDLA doesn't include a link -- or make any mention, as far as I can tell -- of the Kentuckiana Digital Library, a rich online collection of more than half a million items, including books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, maps, manuscripts and oral histories. Their Kyleidoscope page organizes the content by themes such as Growth of a New State or Industrial Kentucky.
Over at the Kentucky Historical Society, there's additional online content to choose from. The site features a number of digital collections, including:
- Burley Tobacco Oral History Project
- Calk Collection
- Chescheir Family Collection
- Churchill Weavers Collection
- Civil Rights in Kentucky Oral History Project
- Community Memories Project
- Family History Presentations and Handouts
- Holocaust Survivors Oral History Project
- Kentucky Constitutional Convention, 1890-91
- Manuscripts
- Maps and Atlases
- Martin F. Schmidt Collection
- Museum Artifacts, Paintings and Art
- North Frankfort (Craw) Real Estate Appraisals
- Ohio River Portrait Project
- Oral History and Audio Visual Materials
- Photographs and Negatives
- Printed Materials
- Ronald Morgan Postcard Collection
- Survivors of the Bataan Death March Oral History Project
- Visual Materials
The University of Kentucky offers a valuable family history tool with its Kentucky Vital Records Index. You can search for deaths (1911-1992), marriage (1973-1993) and divorce (1973-1993). Oddly, no online birth records are available.
All in all, there's a lot of online material scattered about for Kentucky history. Happy hunting!
More historical archives and research materials can be found at these excellent resources:
