Genealogy Research

Research Your Family Tree

Roots, the 1977 television mini-series based on Alex Haley's book sparked a renewed interest in genealogy for many people. Back in the 70's, learning about your ancestors was a tedious job. But now, personal computers and the Internet make it MUCH easier. Here are some of the best online resources for doing genealogical research and charting your family tree.

CYNDI'S LIST

...is a comprehensive index to over 200,000 genealogical resources on the Internet. You'll find a list of links that point you to genealogical research sites, all categorized & cross-referenced. It's like a "card catalog" to the genealogical collection in the immense library that is the Internet.

http://www.CyndisList.com

GENEALOGY RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET

This site co-authored by John Fuller is similar to Cyndi's List though there are significant differences. The two main sections are web sites and genealogy mailing lists. The web section is extensive though it is somewhat modest related to Cyndi's List; however, the mailing list section is the premier site for such lists with over 25,000 entries and 100 or so added weekly.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~jfuller/internet.html

ROOTSWEB

The oldest and one of the most extensive genealogy sites on the Internet ... and everything is free. It serves as host to many of the genweb sites (discussed next), thousands of mailing lists, census projects, Cyndi's List, WorldConnect, has a large number of genealogy search engines, and much more.

http://www.rootsweb.com

USGENWEB

An outstanding project that has pages for each state and each county in each US state with extensive links to applicable resources, query boards, surname lists, and most anything else imaginable. You can get to the county pages from the state pages, and to the state pages from the main page shown above.

http://www.usgenweb.com

WORLDGENWEB

A project similar to USGENWEB that has sites for every country other than the US. This project is a bit younger than USGENWEB and there are some countries that still need coordinators; however, these are generally countries that folks have never heard of :)

http://www.worldgenweb.org

FAMILYSEARCH

The Mormon Church operates this site that allows you to access the the top level documentation available from the LDS archives. Obviously it would be a huge job to put their millions of microfilm records online, but what they have available is an excellent starting point for anyone contemplating use of their resources.

http://www.familysearch.org

ELLIS ISLAND

If one of your ancestors came to the USA by way of the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, search their name and you can access his or her records in some detail. I was impressed that the database allows you to search using last name, ethnicity, name of town they left, year of arrival and more. You can even see a copy of the ship's manifest listing their names!

http://www.ellisislandrecords.org

Genealogy Software

Family Tree Maker - http://www.FamilyTreeMaker.com

GedPage - http://www.frontiernet.net/~rjacob/gedpage.htm