Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources is a reference book published by Ancestry Publishing. The first edition, called Ancestry's Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources was published in 1989 and was edited by Alice Eichholz, Ph.D., CG. A revised edition was published in 1992. The current edition, the third, was published in 2004 when the title was changed to simply Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.

About the content

A sample of a county map for Vermont included in Red Book: American State, County, and Town Resources.

Red Book is designed to help family historians learn where to find information about their ancestors by taking an approach focused on localities. It is an expansive guide to the most useful resources in each of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia. Organized by state, the content easily directs the user to information-rich resources in areas including:

Vital Records

Census Records

Internet Resources

County Resources

Background Sources

Land Records

Probate Records

Court Records

Tax Records

Cemetery Records

Church Records

Military Records

Periodicals, Newspapers, and Manuscript Collections

Archives, Libraries, and Societies

Major highlights of the content are the county resources published in table format for each state. Information in these tables often include county name, when the county was formed, which counties the new county was created from, and dates for when each county started recording information such as birth, marriage, and death records or land, probate and court records. Each state also has a county, town, or parish map.

About the contributors

With Alice Eichholz, Ph.D., CG at the helm of this massive undertaking as the editor, the Red Book is a result of the collective effort of renowned professional researchers and state archivists. Their expertise set the standard for resource identification.

Here you can find a list of contributors to the third edition of Red Book.

Red Book Online

In 2010, Ancestry.com digitized the content of Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources along with The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy and made it available in wiki format as one of the foundational sources for the Ancestry.com Wiki. Each chapter has been broken into one or more series of articles, links to which are found below: