Family research at the National Archives centers on the use of federal records.  To start the process, we always advise researchers to first consider how their ancestors may have come into contact with the federal government during the course of their daily lives.  If your great-grandparents purchased a homestead in Nebraska, they probably filed an application [...]

We are happy to announce that we are going to start having posts on Fridays that are related to family history and genealogy research — with an emphasis on online research and access. John and Katherine will be joining our team of bloggers, and they plan to take turns posting. Look for the first post [...]

This afternoon we posted the first batch of Mathew Brady Civil War photographs on our Flickr photostream.  These are at a higher resolution (300 dpi) than they are  elsewhere online.  We are planning to post all 6,066. If looking at this selection sparks your curiosity, browse or search among all 6,000 now in the Archival [...]

Students and Teachers: Have you (or one of your students) used National Archives’ records in a National History Day (NHD) project? What were the records, and how did they shape what you thought about your topic? In order to help students and teachers find historical materials relevant to their research, we post a list of [...]

We’ve loved reading your suggestions and comments about sharing NARA’s holdings on Flickr, and it’s been interesting to see which images people are marking as favorites. All of this got us wondering about which records NARA insiders are particularly fond of, so we asked a few of our experienced colleagues for their picks. First up… [...]