Illinois

At what I suppose is the official website of the Illinois State Archives, you'll find some quite incredible genealogy resources as well as some deep content on more general history. 

Start off with the list of Online Databases, and prepare to be impressed.  This is some collection.

For starters, there's an all-too-rare slavery and emancipation database which allows lookups by name of slave or owner, or by other search parameters, such as location or date.

There's also an unusual set of more than half a million records of public domain land sales where you can find property ownership for the likes of Abraham Lincoln. 

Other treasures here include:

Illinois Veteran Records, including those from wars you don't often hear about, like the Black Hawk War, or the Winnebago War (probably not what you think!). 

Some fairly standard Vital Records Databases:

• Marriage Index, 1763–1900
• Death Index, Pre–1916
• Death Index (1916–1950)

Perhaps most unusual of all is the collection of the Illinois Regional Archives Depositories (IRAD).  Just look at the variety of (mostly county) records you can find here:

• Birth Certificates Index
• Death Certificate Registers Index
• Court of Common Pleas Case Files Index
• Circuit Court Case Files Index
• Coroner's Inquest Record Index
• Probate Case Files Index
• Circuit Court Criminal Case Files Index
• Will Record Index
• Almshouse Registers Index
• Chicago Police Department Homicide Record
• Naturalization Papers
• Farm Board Record Index
• Guardian's Case Files Index

Best of all, for genealogy buffs, anyway, Illinois had the cyber-presence of mind to host a Global Database Search,  a one-stop lookup where you can search for family names (or anyone's name!) in all name-lookup databases in one easy search. 

Lastly, there is also a somewhat annoyingly-presented Illinois Township Plats site, with detailed maps from the entire state.



The second site of note is the Illinois Digital Archive with dozens of topic areas, but not always as much content as one might expect.   Only 42 documents on Abraham Lincoln! C'mon guys...there's gotta be more to Honest Abe's history than that!   Still, there are some interesting and very diverse materials here, in the following collections: