Of course we all have a family. (Dah). But have you ever
wondered where your family came from? Or who you are related
to? Maybe your family goes back to Royalty! Or maybe you are
related to someone really rich or really famous. Ever wondered?
With the internet you can do research that would have taken
your grand father months or years to accomplish. Here’s
some information and links to get you on the road to knowing
your family! (BTW. I was able to trace my family back to early
England around 1,000AD!)
Here we go…….
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 and cross-referenced. It’s like a “card
catalog” to the genealogical collection in the immense
library that is the Internet. http://www.CyndisList.com
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
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
An outstanding project that has pages for each US 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
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
The Mormon Church operates this site that allows you to access
the top level documentation available from the their 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
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
