 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
Foreign Exploration | |
 |
101 Best Undiscovered Web Sites 2005 | |
|
August 2005 issue | |
| . |  |
|
 |
||||
| Ethnic Toolkits Web Exclusive Forms Bookstore Soundex Code Generator Article Search Writing Workshops Newsletter |
||||
Foreign Exploration
1837Online.com Automated Genealogy British History Online Burke's Peerage & Gentry Case Files for Early Immigrants to San Francisco and Hawaii Croatia in English Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online FamilyRelatives.org The Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS The French Connection Genlias Genline German Roots and Genealogy Information Wanted InGeneas It's All Relative Library of Congress European Reading Room The National Archivist Radix The Research Program in Historical Demography The Scotsman Digital Archive Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center Find news and reviews on more great Web sites in the August 2005 Family Tree Magazine.
Paid Content
www.1837online.com
This new British pay-per-view site offers the 1861 census (so far, images from London, Middlesex, Surrey, Essex and Kent counties); an index of births, marriages and deaths ("BMDs") from various time periods; and WWI, WWII and overseas BMDs. You can view, save and print up to 50 pages of images for about $9.
automatedgenealogy.com
In the works here is a free index to the 1901 Canadian census, with 5.4 million lines transcribed. Search on your ancestor's name, then use the geographic data in the transcription to find an image of his record at the National Archives of Canada Web site www.archives.ca, which you can search only by geographic location, not by name. A similar index to the 1906 Census of the Northwest Provinces is also underway.
www.british-history.ac.uk
This growing collection from the University of London and the History of Parliament Trust includes documents about the people, places and businesses of Britain's medieval and early modern periods.
www.burkes-peerage.net
Look for links to British nobility with this database of 1 million names in 7,000 family records, each scrutinized by a team of professional genealogists. Powerful search options include date, place of education, residences and more. You can subscribe for as little as 24 hours, starting at about $30.
groups.haas.berkeley.edu/iber/casefiles
This collaboration between the University of California-Berkeley and the National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) Pacific Region helps you find ancestral needles in the haystack of immigration records at that NARA facility. The database indexes case files for nearly 250,000 immigrants who arrived in San Francisco and Honolulu between 1882 and 1955. Search on name, birthplace, port or ship; alternatively, links at the bottom of the search page will launch lists of entries alphabetized by last name. Use the details you find here to look up the actual case file at the Pacific Region in San Bruno, Calif.
www.croatia-in-english.com/gen
Need help getting started on your Croatian roots research? Don't miss this site's seven step-by-step tutorials and other resources.
www.biographi.ca/en
If you have ancestors from the United States' neighbor to the north, they-or their relatives-might be in this huge online reference. The site provides access to the 14 volumes of the print edition to date, covering people who died between the years 1000 and 1930, and to a selection of biographies from unprinted volumes. You can search all the biographies by keyword; some let you query by identity/ profession or by geographic region.
www.familyrelatives.org
Here's yet another new pay-per-view Web site for British research. It contains all known civil-registration index images from 1866 to 1983, plus a searchable database for births, marriages and deaths from 1866 to 1920 and 1984 to 2002. That's 300 million searchable records in all. The cost is modest: You get 60 "units" for about $10; accessing a record requires one to four units.
www.fjc.ru
Get help researching your Jewish roots in 15 countries of the former Soviet Union. The federation can point you to ancestral towns and even kosher restaurants there.
users.adelphia.net/~frenchcx
Say oui to more than 500 pages on French-Canadian ancestry, focusing heavily on connections to Maine and Acadian genealogy.
www.genlias.nl
This site gives a new meaning to being "in Dutch." A joint product of the Netherlands' regional history centers and state archives, Genlias has 5.7 million records on 25.5 million people, taken directly from the country's Civil Register of births, marriages and deaths-the most important source for Dutch genealogical research from 1811 on. More records are being added, including marriage records from all provinces. (If you're not fluent in Dutch, click on the English link in the upper right-hand corner.)
www.genline.com
Though pricey (about $45 per month), this subscription site will revolutionize your Swedish genealogy research. Say goodbye to squinting at microfilm, as Genline brings more than 11 million church records-pretty much all extant records from every province-to your desktop in digitized form. And Genline's accompanying FamilyFinder utility makes navigating the records a snap. (Read our review of the site in the June 2005 Family Tree Magazine.)
www.geocities.com/german_genealogy
At this straightforward site, you'll find oodles of links to German databases, ship lists, maps and how-to help.
infowanted.bc.edu
This database of "Missing Friends" might help locate your hard-to-find Irish ancestors. From 1831 to 1921, the Boston Pilot newspaper's Missing Friends column carried advertisements from people looking for "lost" friends and relatives who'd emigrated from Ireland. The database contains a text record for each of the 31,525 ads that appeared in the Pilot.
www.ingeneas.com
This site focuses on Canadian passenger lists and other immigration documents, but also includes census, military, land and vital records.
www.iarelative.com
Central European roots researchers will want to bookmark It's All Relative, which offers tools and resources to help track down Czech, Bohemian, Moravian, Slovak, Lemko and Carpatho-Rusyn ancestors. (For more on Czech and Slovak research, see page 54.)
www.loc.gov/rr/european
Just because it's "America's library doesn't mean the Library of Congress (LOC) isn't a valuable resource for your European research. This site gives an overview of the LOC's collections and offers digitized books, including historical telephone directories for Romania and Poland.
www.nationalarchivist.com
This commercial site has licensed databases from the United Kingdom's archives-some free, others for modest fees. You'll find digital images in collections such as Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths at Sea (1854 to 1890) and Index to Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (1858 to 1903), plus military records, emigration and passport papers, directories, professional registers and British colonial documents.
www.bogardi.com/gen
Find your ancestors in Radix's goulash of Hungarian historical records, including a searchable 1891 industry and trade directory, a 1913 gazetteer, a guide to 6,000 surname spelling alternatives and other resources.
www.genealogie.umontreal.ca/en
Quebec researchers turn to this site's database of 710,000 baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in Catholic parish registers before 1800. A basic search is free, but for more-in-depth information, you'll have to subscribe for about $16 (this gets you 150 "hits," or pages).
archive.scotsman.com
It's free to search this archive containing every issue of the Scottish newspaper published between 1817 and 1950, including news stories and birth, marriage and death notices. You'll pay to view the actual articles, but you can learn a lot about your Scottish ancestors with a one-day pass for 7.95 pounds (about $15).
www.augustana.edu/administration/swenson
Though you'll have to visit the center in person to explore the actual archives, this handy Web site will get you started with how-to tips, genealogy links and PDF versions of the
center's newsletter.
|
|
