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101 Best Family History Web Sites
By Melanie Rigney
The Big Picture
www.familysearch.org www.rootsweb.com www.usgenweb.com www.ancestry.com www.heritagequest.com www.genealogylibrary.com genforum.genealogy.com www.gendex.com/gendex www.gentree.com/gentree.html www.surnamesearch.com www.familyhistory.com www.bearhaven.com/family/growth.html vitalrec.com eclectic.ss.uci.edu/linkages/linkages.html
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shares access to its Ancestral File (35 million-plus names), the International Genealogical Index for nearly 20 regions (more than 600 million names) and Web site links, along with a center for collaborating with others working your names and more than 150 church publications.
Claims to be the Internet's oldest and largest genealogy community. The site is home to the RootsWeb surname list of more than 700,000 entries and offers two e-newsletters and online genealogical courses. Links extend to interests beyond genealogy, such as folklore, crafts and dancing. RootsWeb will host your Web site if you contribute $50 per year or more.
The goal of this volunteer project is to create Web sites for genealogical research in every US state and county. The information's free, but the quality and quantity varies widely from site to site. Still, once you know what you're looking for, it's worth a shot. Many of the sites have local histories, original county boundaries, query boards and more.
Ancestry.com offers access to more than 1,800 databases and 500 million names to subscribers ($59.95 per year or $19.95 per quarter) and significantly less access for free. These are the folks who publish Ancestry and Genealogical Computing magazines. The for-pay database includes the Periodical Source Index, or PERSI, the most widely used index of genealogical and historical articles.
In addition to Heritage Quest magazine, members of the Heritage Quest Research Club get discounted books, software, magazines, CD-ROMs and more for $29.95 a year. Heritage Quest's products include what it says is the US' largest private collection of family-history data on microfilm, more than 250,000 titles.
It's Genealogy.com again, this time offering access to 2,147 databases, including more than 200,000 census images, if you're willing to pay $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.
Includes forums for 16,000 surnames, with more than 2.5 million messages archived. You can set up your own list of surname forums to follow (the display isn't great). You can post to the forum, or get the e-mail address of the person whose post interests you. Part of the Genealogy.com site.
The GENDEX server indexes nearly 4,000 online databases (including 390,000 surnames and nearly 16 million people) and lets you locate and view the data of interest. While the information is free, faster access and the ability to filter surname requests requires a rather novel payment plan: You send the owner at least $10, and for each $10, you get 1,000 information credits. When you run out of credits, your account reverts from registered to unregistered mode until you send more money.
Lots of databases here, but you must know the author of the database to make the most efficient use of the site.
Just what it sounds like: loads of links to surname databases and more. The bad news is that the home page takes forever to load.
This Ancestry.com spinoff hosts more than 65,000 message boards for surnames and other genealogy-related topics, plus offers a free newsletter and family site hosting.
With all these databases, where do you start? This site seeks to help you sort just how big each is, how much use costs and how fast the number of names present is growing.
Where to obtain vital records (such as birth, death and marriage certificates and divorce decrees) from each US state, territory and county. A great source of information, including the charge for records, the years they are available and the address to write. There also are links to non-US vital records sites.
The University of California-Irvine is working to assemble a database of kinship records, genealogies and ethnographic data. Among the 150-plus cases currently available is a partial genealogy of US presidents.
Melanie Rigney is the editor of Writer's Digest magazine www.writersdigest.com and a long-time family history researcher.
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