Web-wary family historians sometimes scoff at the notion of Internet genealogy. You can't do real research online, they insist. Well, we have news for those naysayers: Times have changed. Over the past few years, commercial companies, state agencies, genealogical societies and individual researchers have joined in a feverish rush to put valuable genealogy material online.

We're not talking about links to library catalogs, instructions for ordering records offline or undocumented assertions about your family tree. Today, the Web holds the same kinds of treasures you'd find at the library or courthouse — data once found only in manuscripts, books and microfilm. You'll come across everything from state vital-records indexes and gravestone transcriptions to digitized 19th-century newspapers and maps of your ancestors' town. You can access the entire US census and every Ellis Island passenger list, full military pension files and even foreign countries' records.