Genealogists were among the very first hobbyists to put the Web to work for them. With its aid, the search for family history has grown beyond the confines of dusty bookshelves and become a family hobby. Today, there are several huge sites and volunteer networks to help genealogists.
RootsWeb is the Internet's oldest and largest free genealogy community. The mailing list started in 1987 and the surname list in 1988, and now it processes more than 180 million e-mail messages on over 18,000 mailing lists each month.
There are millions of pages of free genealogical data and several large database projects underway. RootsWeb hosts 144,000 message boards and more than 12,000 independent sites. It is a world unto itself and a major piece of genealogy online. Visit RootsWeb at www.rootsweb.com.
The Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, has the world's largest collection of genealogical material, which it has been assembling since the Church was founded.
They have been extremely active in promoting the use of computers in genealogy research, and their Personal Ancestral File 4.0.4 program is top-notch and free for the download. Recently, they opened their impressive Family Search online site, and it is as deep and wide as it is impressive. It's a professional undertaking, but non-commercial as it is run by the Church. If you are starting out and need some software for your PC/Mac, get their PAF 4.1 program. It is the standard that allows you to exchange and share information. Visit Family Search at www.familysearch.com.
Genealogists are always looking for people in obscure places on the other end of the country - looking for their Uncle Ed who moved to Wila County in 1892. The problem was always being able to consult all of Wila County's records and information. There are courthouse records, church records, private genealogies, and stray references scattered all over the world and the Web. To solve the problem, the U.S. GenWeb project was created.
The solution was for one or two dedicated volunteers to concentrate on just one county in a U.S. state and to set up a web site accessing every available resource for that county. Now, if you 're looking for information about Syracuse, you simply go to GenWeb's Onondaga County site in their New York State section. The entire United States and Canada are covered. You can find the U.S. GenWeb Project at www.usgenweb.org.
And, finally, if you need more genealogical help, you can try Cyndi's List. It's an online directory of close to 50,000 links in more than 120 categories. It should speed up your search. Cyndi's List can be found at www.cyndislist.com.
By Michael Mills The world of online genealogy shows how the Web can transform a hobby, and there are hints at what can be done for stamp collectors.
The above article is reprinted with permission from the May issue of The American Philatelist, the monthly publication of the American Philatelic Society. A philatelist is someone who collects stamps and/or related material. Grandboomers feels that passing the family history along to new generations is important and was in the midst of preparing an article on this topic when the above story appeared. Our thanks to the APS for allowing us to reprint this piece.
Additional assistance in finding your family tree might be found at the home page of Joyce Rhoades Jenks. If any of our viewers have genealogical sites they would like to add, please email us at letters@grandboomers.com.
© 2012 Created by Myles Bristowe.
