William Shakespeare was no genealogist or else he wouldn't have asked "What's in a name?" Instead, the Bard would have spent his off-hours searching for the "spear-brandishing" ancestor who gave the family its name.

If Shakespeare had lived in our era of bits and bytes rather than quill pen and ink, he would have tried to find "what's in a name" using the Internet. And, just like many contemporary genealogists who've found themselves caught in the Web, old Will would have probably come away frustrated. A search for the Shakespeare surname on FamilySearch's British Isles International Genealogical Index <www.familysearch.org>, for example, returns 200 results without even getting past first names beginning with A. There's got to be a better way, right?