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101 Best Web Sites

By David A. Fryxell

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Just starting out? Prefer to search online? Doing the DNA thing? This year's menu of top family history Web sites lets you have it your way.

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Our annual list of the 101 Best Web Sites for genealogy has been a Family Tree Magazine staple since the beginning, but this year it occurred to us to wonder: best for whom? After all, among the 101 sites we single out for excellence, not all are equally useful for every genealogist. Family researchers come to the Web with a dizzying array of needs, and few sites can satisfy all their individual appetites.

Maybe you're just getting started. Or perhaps you've followed at least one branch of your family back to the point when your ancestors arrived in America, and you're ready to jump the pond. You may have special interests, such as tracing African-American or Jewish family trees.

And let's face it: Genealogists have tastes and druthers as varied as their research needs. Some of us truly enjoy scrolling good-old-fashioned microfilm. For others, the whole point of a 101 Best Web Sites list is to facilitate as much actual research online as possible, minimizing time and money spent on trips to the library.

While space won't permit customizing a complete 101 list for every type of Web-using genealogist, we can break up this year's collection into a new "Best for..." kind of category. We've grouped our 2008 honorees by the users each site is most suited for, from beginners to hard-core researchers. Most of the superb sites on this year's menu, of course, will appeal to multiple types of genealogists—and in some cases we've suggested such cross-references—so start sampling the sites that are best for you, but don't ignore the other categories.

As always, these sites are free unless marked with a $ to signify that access to some or all of the content requires a fee. Bon appetit!