For online genealogists, it's the stuff of legend: a single Web site brimming with millions of searchable, digitized genealogical records — all available to you for free. You've been cautioned not to expect it, warned that such a treasure would certainly come with a price tag, as do digital document hot spots Ancestry.com <ancestry.com> and Genealogy.com <genealogy.com>.

Well, we hope you're sitting down — because that Holy Grail does exist. It's called HeritageQuest Online, and it puts some of family historians' favorite resources just a few clicks away. Namely, the site serves up all US censuses from 1790 to 1930, Revolutionary War pension and land records, 20,000-plus published family and local history books, and an index to more than 1.6 million articles in at least 6,500 genealogical journals, as well as a recently added collection of Freedman's Bank depositor registers from 1865 to 1874.