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101 Best Family History Web Sites
By Melanie Rigney
The good news is that the Internet has a zillion sites to help research your roots.
The bad news is that there are a zillion sites-how do you find the ones with the answers you need? Get clicking with our picks of 101 of the best genealogy resources on the Web.
The Internet is overflowing with tens of thousands of sites with information about getting started with your family history research, finding your ancestors, sharing your discoveries and networking with others. But if you jump on the Web without preparing for your journey, you'll be as frustrated as if you tried to find Space Mountain without a Disney World map.
Before you sign on:
- Scour your family records to see what you already know. Check Bibles, baby books and all those boxes of letters, photo albums and scrapbooks gathering dust on basement shelves. Interview relatives about their memories
- Make a list of what you don't know (and of contradictory information) and where you're most likely to find the answers. Road trip to the local courthouse, or to another part of the country where your family lived for a long time. Take more pictures and video than you think you'll ever use, and make copies of every record. Don't rely on your memory or your notes; document everything you can.
- Check out libraries and genealogical and historical societies for local histories that explain migration patterns into the area and help you better understand why your ancestors might have arrived (or left) when they did.
- Compile a list of what you still don't know and prioritize it.
- Get online, and use these Web sites to help you strike gold. Some of our sites will also help you make the most of the non-virtual world of genealogy.
The logic of doing as much spadework as possible before you start searching mega-databases is obvious: You're a lot more likely to find information about your third-great-grandfather Smith if you know his son Josiah was born in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., in 1842 than if you start scouring all the online Smith surname databases when you're not even sure of your own grandfather's first name or where he grew up.
New genealogical sites go up every day, and new databases and queries are added to existing sites. Some information is free; you must pay for access to some. In either case, be sure to document your source. And don't assume anything you get on the Internet or via e-mail is gospel-after all, how many copies have you received of the non-existent Good Times virus warning or of that dratted chocolate-chip-cookie recipe? But with a little prep work and searches that include these Web sites, we think you'll find something valuable within the maze of Internet genealogy.
Melanie Rigney is the editor of Writer's Digest magazine www.writersdigest.com and a long-time family history researcher.
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