Other Days         The Master Genealogist 5.0         Heredis         Mapping Software         Surnames on the Web     .         Newsletter Forms Bookstore Courses Resources		Winning the Name Game Nancy Hendrickson Use the Web—don't get lost in it—with these 13 lucky surname-searching strategies and sites for finding your family names online. Getting Personal Did you know there are thousands of personal Web sites devoted to surname research and data compilation? I bet you have an ancestor on one of them. Personal Web sites are the pages posted online by individuals or groups of individuals who are collecting GEDCOMs (the universal file format for family trees), photos or historical information about a specific surname or branch of a family. Sites may contain photos of the family homestead, an online database, a query board, favorite music or scrapbook. The Hume Family Home Page homepages.rootsweb.com/~hume, for example, features pictures of Scottish castles near and dear to the Hume/Home family. There are also links to the Hume message board at RootsWeb-Ancestry boards.ancestry.com, GenForum www.genforum.com and the Tartans Bulletin Board www.tartans.com. In addition, you'll find a bibliography of books containing Hume references, as well as Webmaster Jim Hume's database containing 46,991 individuals in 17,323 families, including 12,365 people with the Hume/Home surname. The Wickware-Wickwire Family Page www.wickware.com contains a unique online "museum"—a collection of photos of family history and memorabilia. The Webmaster of Kassell Connections www.geocities.com/Heartland/Estates/4375/kassell.html has uploaded information about the Cassell/Kassell families of the St. Louis and Chicago areas from the mid-1800s to the present. Their pages include family census, cemetery and city directory listings, as well as links to other Kassell researchers. Not named Hume, Wickwire or Kassell? Don't worry: Somewhere out there you'll probably find a page full of goodies about your surname. Here are some ways to start looking: Search engines: The quickest way to locate surname sites is to use one of the major nongenealogy search engines such as Google www.google.com or AltaVista www.altavista.com. Yes, you'll get thousands of hits if you have a common surname (Smith genealogy turns up 282,000), but the top half-dozen or so will probably be relevant. I did a quick run-through on Google for Faulkenberry genealogy and got a manageable 501 results. Wouldn't you know it, one of them actually had land records relating to my third-great-grandfather. Cyndi's List: From Cyndi Howells' invaluable home page www.cyndislist.com, scroll down to the Personal Home Pages category. Then click on the letter of the alphabet for your surname. If you don't find any pages with your name, that doesn't mean it isn't there. Unfortunately, Cyndi's Personal Home Pages are listed alphabetically by the name of the Web page, not necessarily the surname. So if someone named a Web page "Genealogy of the Rutherford Family," that site will be listed with the G pages, not the Rs. You can work around this problem by going to the top of Cyndi's main page, clicking Search Cyndi's List, and entering your surname. This technique will also help you pick up surnames that are listed as allied families but are not the main surname on a Web site. For example, the "Law, Bruce, French, Parks, Rogers and Hollister" lines are listed under a Taggart page. But Cyndi's on-site search engine will find them. Genealogy Resources on the Internet: You can search for surnames on this site www-personal.umich.edu/~cgaunt/surnames.html either alphabetically or using the on-site search engine. If you opt for the search engine, it will return any occurrence of the surname, including personal Web sites and surname-specific mailing lists. FamilySearch's Search Family History Web Sites: Although you've probably used the FamilySearch site www.familysearch.org to explore the Ancestral File or International Genealogical Index (IGI), the site also has links to thousands of personal Web pages. From the main page, click Search, then Search Family History Web Sites. You can narrow your search by Place, Category and Web Site Language, or you can search just sites in the Surname or Surname Association category. Gengateway: This is a portal site www.gengateway.com to thousands of surname-related Web sites. It contains more than 200,000 listings and 90,000 different surnames. In all, the number of surnames found within entries on the site totals more than 500,000. After entering your surname in the search box, a results page is generated with links to personal Web pages, surname bulletin boards and researchers. The Gengateway site also contains its own searchable query forum. Genealogy.com: The folks best known for selling Family Tree Maker software also host a virtual online community for users' personal Web pages. The pages are searchable by surname or keyword. Enter your search terms at www.genealogy.com/community.html and the system will pull out all of the family home pages with that name. Don't panic if the search results number in the thousands: A search of Hume returned 4,302 matching documents, but on close examination, several of the hits were generated from the same Web site. Lord of the Web Rings If you have a Web site, you may have fun joining a WebRing—a loosely knit confederation of sites that contain similar content. There are WebRings for just about every interest, including cats, science fiction, antique lamps and genealogy, even for surnames. The idea behind WebRings is that they make it easy for Web surfers to find similar sites by clicking from one member in a WebRing to another. The "ring" concept refers to the fact that if you visit every member site, you'll end up back where you started. The big player in offering WebRings is, appropriately enough, WebRing! dir.webring.com/rw. You can join one of its existing rings (there are more than 300 dedicated to surnames) or create your own. Joining or creating a WebRing is free and easy to set up. To create a WebRing, you need to sign up for an ID (it's free). Next, name your ring and describe it ("The Macbeth Family WebRing, dedicated to sites researching the history and genealogy of the Macbeth Family"). You'll be asked to categorize your ring, which in this case would be under Family/Genealogy/Lineages and Surnames. After adding the address (URL) of your site, your ring will be activated. To remain active, the ring must contain at least three Web sites. At this point, you can send an invitation to Webmasters of other related sites to join your ring. You'll also be given the code to place on your Web site. The code produces a box that identifies your site as belonging to the ring, and contains navigation arrows to visit other sites in the ring. As RingMaster you can edit the ring's logo, change the color scheme, e-mail everyone in your ring, and view ring statistics. Creating your own WebRing can help you develop a surname- specific virtual community. You can find other genealogy WebRings at members.tripod.com/~westland/genealogy_web_rings.htm. Find it on the Web More online surname resources: Distant Cousin www.distantcousin.com 500 Most Common Surnames in England www.statistics.gov.uk/themes/compendia_reference/Articles/surnames.asp Lineages and Surnames dir.yahoo.com/Arts/humanities/history/genealogy/lineages_and_surnames Surname Origins www.digiserve.com/heraldry/surnames.htm Surname Web surnameweb.com For more information on genealogy software and technology, see the October issue of Family Tree Magazine.
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