Searching the Internet for your family history can bring to mind that line about water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink: You find yourself swimming in data, but unable to quench your thirst for clues. Do your Internet searches produce either no matches at all or a million and one sites that don't answer your question? The missing links in your family tree could be hiding somewhere in the billions of pages of the World Wide Web. But finding what you need in the ocean of Internet info requires a methodical approach. Here we offer 10 Internet search strategies, both general and specific, to put your online genealogical research on the right track to results:

1. TRY SEVERAL INTERNET SEARCH SITES.