Record type

Letters, diaries and papers — where to find them free

Personal and institutional papers held by libraries and archives: the texture of a life, and sometimes the only record of it.

Public archives Provara searches for letters, diaries and papers

live Wikimedia Commons (free-licensed photographs)

Wikimedia Foundation · World

147M free-licensed media files: historical photographs, portraits, maps, scanned documents from GLAM partners

Licence: Per file: public domain / CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only · terms read 2026-09-06

How to ask

In Provara, ask Provara whether an archive holds papers from a family or a place. With web search on, it searches this archive in one call, reads the best hits, and proposes only what the record it read supports — with the record beside the claim.

Start free

No card needed. Build and source your tree free; search these archives free; the assistant's research runs on tokens.

Every licence on these pages was read from the archive's own terms on the date shown. Provara proposes only what a record it has read supports, shows the record beside the claim, and marks anything unsourced as a hypothesis. Nothing on this page states a fact about any person.