Best Continental European Genealogy Websites of 2015

Whether you’re looking for Jewish, Norwegian, Irish, Scottish or another heritage, these websites have great resources for finding your European ancestry.

ArkivDigital $

Color images of more than 53 million historical documents, including church records of every type, make browsing for your Swedish ancestors (almost) fun. Cost is about $100 for six months.

A handsome new companion site, Avotaynu Online <www.avotaynuonline.com> offers instructive posts and collaboration, while the original site’s Consolidated Jewish Surname Index continues to search 42 different databases totaling more than 7.3 million records.

Danish Demographic Database

This free, English-friendly site serves up Danish censuses from 1787 on, plus selected probate records.

Digitalarkivet

Search for your Norwegian ancestors in digitized censuses or browse a now-extensive collection of parish and other records, all for free. You also can download PDF files of the 1801, 1865, 1900 and 1910 Norway censuses, a development that should have you saying “Skoal!”

FamilyRelatives.com $

Find your far-flung English-speaking ancestors among parish, military and civil-registration data—plus more obscure sources such as occupational directories—from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Pay per view or subscribe for about $40 a year.

Genealogyindexer.org

Specializing in records from Central and Eastern Europe, this site offers more than 544,000 pages of historical directories, 71,000 pages of memorials to Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust, 32,000 pages of Polish and Russian military documents, 41,000 pages of community and personal histories, and 24,000 pages of Polish secondary school annual reports and other school sources.