Tools & Guides
Not every resource here is a place to search or an organization to join. Some are guides I keep coming back to — the kind that teach a method or unpack the history behind a record, rather than handing you a document outright. This list will grow as I find more.
Evidence Explained
Elizabeth Shown Mills' companion site to her book of the same name is the standard reference for citing genealogical sources — not just formatting, but thinking through what kind of source you're actually looking at and how much weight it can bear. I turn to this whenever a source doesn't fit neatly into a citation template I already know.
U.S. Historical Law Guides
State-by-state guides to the laws that shaped the records genealogists rely on — marriage age and consent, property and dower rights, intestate succession, guardianship, court-testimony qualifications — from each state's settlement period through 1950, written in plain language rather than legal jargon. Every guide cites the digests, codes, and session laws behind it, with links to the primary sources where they've been digitized. I've found this invaluable for understanding not just what a record says, but what the law required and allowed at the time it was created.