VLO's Mini On-Line Genealogy Researching Guide

    In response to those who have asked for general help on how to begin their on-line genealogy research, I submit this Guide, complete with research site addresses.

    This Guide consists of useful genealogy research sites I have ran into in the past in conducting my own research. A few of the mentioned sites might be more specific to something I was researching but I am attempting, with this Guide, to include only the more general researching sites that would be useful to ALL genealogy researchers.

    Please feel free to E-MAIL ME if you have further questions about this page your my research or if would like to suggest additional sites or changes to this site.

  Beginning Your On-Line Research  

    The best way to proceed is to begin by searching your own surname (last name) or, if you adding to other families in your genealogy, the surname of a specific family branch. In On-Line research, we begin doing this by checking individual surname sites. These can link you what has been written about the family name already or to who is currently researching it or other interesting items about the name.

http://www.gentree.com/ - Great source for finding surnames and other gen links.

http://www.geocities.com/~alacy/spring.htm - Surname Springboard (you can register your page here)

http://www.polaris.net/~legend/genalogy.htm - 8,000+ New Surname Homepage Listings

http://www.rootsweb.com/ - Surnames & USGEN Archives

  Finding or Tracing Individuals  

    Once you know more about surname, you need to start researching about individuals that you have linked to your own family tree (and hopefully to expand from there). Note that tracing individuals or learning about the family surname can be undertaken in any other or done in conjunction with each other as you progress a learn more about the surname and about the individuals in your tree.

    On-Line research for specific individuals is done by finding web pages that have name indexes and GED Com files that let you search up and down a family line once you locate an individual to search upon.

http://www.gendex.com:8080/ - This is one of the largest sites for GED Com trees and is useful for continual searches of individual names.

http://www.ancestry.com/ - Ancestry is a good site for there free Ancestry World Tree database alone but the site is also great for some of the free databases they other in other areas. Further, this site is well worth the $6.95 subscription price (for 100s of databases) if you are serious about your research.

http://www.familytreemaker.com/iffintro.html - Family Tree Maker's Internet Family Finder
 

http://www.kindredkonnections.com/cgi-bin/surname?-1+0+0+English - Kindred Konnections works well for searching individual names that you haven't been able to find elsewhere, however, not much information is revealed. (A site I sometimes use when I think I am running into dead ends)

  On-Line Researching Tips  

    Once you been to build your tree you will want to take time to prefect your data so that you can continue the research through more specialized on-line sources or through book research and also so that others can link to your research and possibly assist you further.

(1) Cross check your data with as many on-line resource as possible to ensure its accuracy

(2) Check name spelling, paying particular attention to surnames that many have change their spelling during emigration to the middle ages and make note on those spelling for future reference.

(3) Check dates and make sure they correspond with others in the family. Also, try to find marriage dates and other dates that may help your research later on.

(4) Try to find the county where individuals died, lived, marriage, etc. Most large archives keep vital records by county in the state that the event happened in.

(5) Attempt to supplement and polish your research by finding out more about the locations mentioned in your trees and by search newspaper indexes and the like for individual biographies.

(6) If possible, make webpages for your research and register those pages with general search engines and other genealogy pages that allow registration. This allows other to help you with your research.

(7) Try to get on surname mailing lists.

  Other Interesting Research Sites  

http://www.CyndisList.com/ - *Cindi's list of Genealogy site in the Internet - 25,000+ links, categorized & cross-referenced, in over 70 categories

http://www.rootsweb.com/~ote/ - The Olive Tree several unique searching areas in is worth a look.

http://mapping.usgs.gov/mac/isb/pubs/booklets/genealogy/genealogy.html -- Using Maps in Genealogy - Online Edition