TOD'S  INTERNET  RESEARCH  GUIDE

The internet can be a very useful tool for research. 
Try some of these links out.  Good luck searching !

 
Rule # 1 :  Use the internet as a starting point for your own research.  After you find your potential ancestors on the internet always try to find books and other source material to back up your findings.  Too many gedcoms are posted on the web without any kind of source material listed with it so often you need to do your own homework to get some valid sources.

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Go to http://www.familysearch.org (LDS).  Over 350 million names are here in the International Genealogical Index and the Ancestral File, many showing ancestors and descendants.  Since this site came up, it has been a very valuable tool for finding new branches.  Keep in mind that this is not considered a primary source because the information comes from submitters, and their sources are not known.  However, submitter names are available along with their addresses.  Use the information you obtain from here as a starting point for your research, then investigate other sources.

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Go to http://www.familytreemaker.com and use their search engine.  If you find a match to your ancestors, it may be on one of their CD's, on the internet, or on their GenealogyLibrary service.  Check out the internet links first, which are always getting updated - (their search engine tends to do a better job at finding genealogical sites).  After that, you may want to consider purchasing the World Family Tree CD your relative may be on.  Before you do this, do a search on the spouse of your ancestor and see if he/she is on the same CD.  I have found this saves a lot of time (and money!)   I have personally purchased the first 17 CDs of the WFT and since I have quite a few ancestors from the 1600's, I have found a lot of matches.  Remember, like at the LDS site these trees are submitted, often without sources, so be aware of that.  Finally, on the subject of source material, you might want to give their GenealogyLibrary service a try.  I found several books they had were on a couple of my relatives (Abell, Loomis, etc.)  and these books were filled with primary source material.  After 2 days looking through this material, I had a lot of new sources that I was not aware of.   Remember though that your luck in finding an ancestor using this service greatly depends on how many ancestors from the 1600's you know.   

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Check out http://www.ancestry.com .  If your relative had a social security number, you can find it here.  This information also gives the last residence of the person and state the card was issued, which can be very helpful.  The GenealogyLibrary service also has acess to this information, but at this site it is FREE.  This site also claims access to over a billion names so you will most likely find something useful on this site.  Another tip:  some states such as California have a lot of birth and death records online for viewing which show up in ancestry.com under "Vital and Church records" after you do your search.  Such a record might even list the valuable "Mother's maiden name".

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Go to http://www.genforum.com.  They have thousands of registered surname forums where you can post your query.  I have made many contacts this way, and you can see who is researching your name.

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Check out the RootsWeb page at http://www.rootsweb.com.   Check out their huge surname list to see who is researching your name.  You can register your own surnames and email others that are researching that name.   Check out the Roots-L mailing lists.  You will want to subscribe to some of these.  They have lists for surnames as well as certain locations your ancestor may have lived.  You can also subscribe in "digest" mode to cut down on the number of emails you get.  I have found many "cousins" through the mailing lists.  Also use the WorldConnect search engine to search their large database of gedcom files for your ancestor.  Remember to look for matches that list source material in them so you can verify it.

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Check out the USGenWeb project at http://www.usgenweb.org/statelinks.html.    This site has links for most counties in the United States.  Click on the state you want and go to the county your ancestor was from to see what resources are available there.  Be sure and post queries at the site and contact any researchers listed there who may be working on your surname.  When I found the Miami County Ohio site, I hit a goldmine of information and they had a large 550,000 database of names of early pioneers in the county.  All counties vary in their resources, so your success may vary.  I would say that the USGenWeb sites played a large role in helping me find my Marshall ancestors. 

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Chances are you probably have some ancestors who came through Ellis Island.  Be sure to check out the new Ellis Island Website to see if your ancestor was listed in their records.  You might get lucky !  Be sure to try different spellings of your ancestor's name.

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Don't forget about using the Usenet newsgroups for research.  You can browse the complete archive from 1995 at Google to see if there were any posts about your ancestor here.  There is also a great group called soc.genealogy.medieval which covers a lot of older ancestors from the 1600's back.  Speaking of royal ancestors, be sure to check out the University of Hull website for a lot of royal gedcoms and site links.

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There are a number of good genealogical sites on the internet.  The best is Cyndi's site which has thousands of links on many topics.  Another good site for searching is I Found It! which is a genealogy search engine.

 

That is just a few links to get you started.  As I run across more good ideas, I will post them here.