The online genealogy world has changed in the three years since our first “101 Best Web Sites” — perhaps as much as the Internet itself. In those heady early days of the Web genealogy boom — this was in only our second issue — it was still pretty amazing that you could use your computer and modem to research your family tree at all. Many of our picks were not much more than lists of links. The queen of such sites, Cyndi's List, boasted 50,000 categorized links; today, you'll find 180,000-plus links at <www.cyndislist.com>. Others among our 101 best were really only the online outposts of various organizations; while one-click access to these genealogical groups remains convenient, the Web sites themselves aren't necessarily all that useful to your research compared to what's out there now. We had a lot more sites with historical background in that original 101, too — useful grounding for your genealogical quest, sure, but now crowded off by sites where you can find real records about your ancestors.

The FamilySearch site <www.familysearch.org> was still new then, and the genealogy world was reverberating with excitement over online access to the Family History Library's Ancestral File, International Genealogical Index and research guides. But look at how just this one site has evolved in three years: Today, you can click for free searches of the 1880 US census, 1881 Canadian census and 1881 British census.

Are we getting spoiled? If we can't find it online, will Web-addicted genealogists not even bother getting up from their computers to trek to the library or the Family History Center? Heck, we'll just wait until those records do find their way online …