From the late 18th century on, enumerators crisscrossed the country tracking down our ancestors. They followed well-marked highways as well as backwoods trails — all in search of countable Americans. We 21st-century Internet genealogists are a lot like those enumerators. Sometimes we stumble through hundreds of sites and never find a familiar name. At other times, one site may shelter a whole neighborhood of family. Genealogy.com <www.genealogy.com> may just be that site.

Genealogy.com's roots go back to the mid-1990s, when Banner Blue Software created FamilyTreeMaker.com, a companion site for its popular genealogy software. At first, the majority of the site's content was dedicated to Family Tree Maker (FTM) users and purchasers of the company's extensive line of genealogy-related CD-ROMs.