Arkansas

The Archives at the Arkansas History Commission are so eager to have you come visit them in person, that it's easy to overlook the fact that there's some good online content here (and take note of their clever URL when you visit). 

It's hard to tell from their homepage that CARAT -- the Catalog of Arkansas Resources and Treasures -- is a listing of their online databases.  This is the place to head first for digital content. You can group-search several data sets at once, including:

• Confederate pensions
• Confederate Home (as in Old Soldiers Home)
• Land Records, 1853-1956
• Photographs
• Biographical Index (Biodex)

These are largely indexes and pointer systems to offline materials, but include enough online information about names, dates and place to be useful sources for family history work and other archival research.  CARAT also includes lookups for many of the other holdings at the archives.


Other stopping off points are:

Arkansas Photo Collection (online images are low resolution, which seems a shame..hi rez copies can be purchased.)

Black History Commission of Arkansas includes mostly pointers to offline materials.

Arkansas Civil War site, with a wide variety of pages on the war itself, and life in antebellum Arkansas.


There is also a (somewhat hidden) Documenting Arkansas page  with a small but significant collection of images, maps, historical documents, and so on...wish they didn't use the very unfriendly CONTENTdm platform, though.  

 
At the Arkansas History Commission there is another search interface for combing through archival content.  Use the Power Search features to pinpoint what you're after.  For instance, setting Type to Photographs will access a large collection of digital images.