Adding visuals to your family history is essential in making it feel real and tangible to readers. Of course, starting with images from your own family’s collection is where you should start, but sometimes finding historical images that relate to places your family lived or visited can also be a great way to add interest to your stories.
Here are some large, very high quality collections to start. Images from these locations are freely available to use.
- Smithsonian Open Access – “more than 4.9 million 2D and 3D digital items”
- Library of Congress’ Free to Use and Reuse Sets – millions of “books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more.”
- Flickr Commons – A collaboration between Flickr and over 100 organizations to share freely available historic images with new images and collections constantly being added.
- National Gallery of Art – over 50,000 images of artwork
- Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access – Over 450,000 images in the public domain.
- Public Domain Image Archive from The Public Domain Review – Over 10,000 handpicked public domain images.
- Getty Museum Artwork – Over 88,000 free-to-use (CC0) images.