General Resources

Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet
A categorized and cross-referenced list of links for genealogical research. The site contains roughly 332,000 links in more than 200 groups.

Daughters of the American Revolution
Use the DAR’s Genealogical Research System for information on lineage and other resources for early Americans, not just patriots, that have been carefully vetted for accuracy.

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
Learn the latest genealogy news here on this quality online genealogy newsletter.

FamilySearch.org
Premium free source of millions of worldwide genealogy records and fully digitized books, sign in but use it for free.

National Archives for Genealogists
Find how to get military records, passenger lists and many more federal records that will be essential for your genealogy research. Learn more about U.S. Census records.

National Genealogical Society
Find free tools for your research as well as membership information, access to courses and trips and a bookstore.

New England Historic and Genealogical Society
Try their free learning resources, get membership information, and subscribe to the free Weekly Genealogist.

USGenWeb Project
Provides a links to each state in the United States and from each state's Web site to every county in the United States. Many have active volunteers who works to monitor, create and provide local information for genealogical research. 

Death Records

Find a Grave 
170 million grave records representing 491,973 cemeteries in over 241 countries. You may find an obituary, family tree and connections to families.

Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records U.S. 
Find here a directory of links to websites with online U.S. death indexes, listed by state and county. Included are death records, death certificate indexes, death notices and registers, obituaries, wills and probate records, and cemetery burials.

Digital Books

Internet Archive
This San Francisco-based nonprofit digital library provides free public access to millions of public domain books and other digitized materials.  Books are fully searchable and can be read using flip page animation. Many historical and genealogy books can be downloaded. 

Google Books
Formerly, Google Book Search and Google Print, it searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to, and stored in its digital database.

Hathi Trust 
A collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries, Google Books, Internet Archive, other libraries and individuals.

American History and Genealogy Project
The American History and Genealogy Project website links to genealogy books that are digitized or transcribed and have been placed online for public viewing.

Immigration

Ellis Island and Port of New York Passenger Arrival Records 
The Port of New York Passenger Records 1820 - 1957 contains the passenger lists of almost 65 million immigrants, passengers, and crew members who came through Ellis Island and the Port of New York from 1820 to 1957. Tip! Use One-Step Search Tools.

Immigrant Ship Transcriber’s Guild
Includes sites to research immigration, emigration, and naturalization, passenger lists, and much more.

One-Step Search Tools
Use Morse’s handy tools for a better search result on the Ellis Island website and find dozens of other tools for researching passenger records, census records, and vital records.

Land Records

The Official Federal Land Records Site
This site gives "access to Federal land conveyance records for the Public Land States. There is also image access to more than five million Federal land title records for Eastern Public Land States, issued between 1820 and the present. Find homestead records here.

Local Genealogy Resources with Digital Records

California Room San Jose Public Library
Provides indexes to sources of information on many San Jose and Santa Clara County pioneers. Try the California Room Database. 

Santa Clara County Archives
Find online searchable indexes to Naturalization, Probate, Coroner Inquests, and more.

Newspapers

Google Newspaper Archive 
Browsable historical newspaper archives dating back over 200 years from around the world including various San Jose newspapers from 1886-1987.

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Digital Collections holds U.S. newspapers, documents and photographs. Genealogy Reference Services can be found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/

Newspaper Archives Online List on Wikipedia 
This site provides a list with links arranged by Country and for the United States a state by state sub list of both free and pay wall blocked online newspaper archives. For California, UC Riverside is host to the 

California Digital Newspaper Collection 
It contains over 400,000 pages of significant historical California newspapers published from 1846-1922, including California's first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California.

Military

Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System
Find information about those who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Other information on the site includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records, which will be amended over time.