Library Collection Overview
About half of the Immigrant Library‘s holdings cover German-speaking areas of Europe and half cover German-settled areas of America.
A small portion of the collection is devoted to general genealogical research as well as some other countries.
Before visiting the library, you may want to become familiar with the holdings in the IGS Library Collection. The Card Catalog includes Publications, Maps, Atlases, Periodicals, DVDs, CDs and Microfilms. The collection also includes proprietary databases which IGS has created or has been given permission to access.
Highlights of the collection include the German materials not readily available elsewhere in the United States.
We have provided a set of Finding Aids which might help to steer you in the right direction with your research. You can search either by geographic location, or by surname of your ancestor. Finding aids identify primary resources at the library, and also suggest links to relevant websites and other bibliographies.
Research Look-Up Services
IGS does not provide genealogical research services in terms of helping researchers build out their entire family trees. IGS also does not provide services to help locate living relatives in Germany or the US.
Our goal at IGS is to help genealogical researchers to advance their family history research as much as possible by sharing our acquired knowledge of German genealogical resources, and by making our Library Collection available to remote researchers via our look-up service.
If you have identified any resource in our Library Collection for which you would like to make a further inquiry, please visit out our Remote Look-Up Services web page.
Or, if you have an inquiry for a specific ancestor, especially those with Germanic roots, please fill out this Research Questionnaire with as much information about an ancestor you are researching as possible, email the completed PDF to researchers@immigrantgensoc.org, and we will determine if we have any resources at our library that may be of assistance to you. We will also attempt to provide suggestions to help you advance your research.