Is there an American Archives like Canada has

[Maq]

http://www.archivescanada.ca/english/index.html

The Canadian Archives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Does the United States have an equivalent repository of Archival Material that a genealogist would find useful?

Much of Library and Archives Canada's collection has not been digitized and is only available in physical form. To use this material, you will have to visit one of our locations. This section provides all the practical information you need to organize a visit to Library and Archives Canada.

Our Location
Library and Archives Canada's (LAC's) services to the public are provided in its main building located in downtown Ottawa:

Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0N4
CANADA

[sybylla]

1. We have a national archives

You'll find them at www.nara.gov or at www.archives.gov

The National Archives is a great source for military research and other specialized research such as Native American ancestry - basically things under the federal government's control. But research is expensive and there are usually really good archives in most states that serve a genealogist better - providing vital records and state historical documents from census records to civil war records to land records. Sometimes this is a state library or library system, sometimes this is the state or local government.

We don't really have a one-stop-shop for research in the US. We also don't have 4 centuries of church records available for researchers either. I absolutely love researching my Canadian roots. Once I got back to the early 1800's, it was easy peasy to take the lines all the way back to France.

[Bitwit1234]

2. One of the best there is

www.familysearch.org this is the Utah LDS site and it has millions of archives.

[sybylla]

3. Incomplete and full of errors - nothing at all like Canada has to offer

I appreciate the LDS contributions of vital , church and governmental records to genealogical efforts. There are large branches of my family I couldn't have found without them. But the contributed data from family researchers is often full of errors and they get propagated for decades.