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At least 40,000 genealogy-related Web sites exist, ranging from huge infodumps like JewishGen (complete with ShtetlSeeker, a searchable map of former Jewish villages in Eastern Europe) to cutting-it-thin specialty depots like Sullivan.com, devoted entirely to ... Sullivans. Sites come in three basic flavors: big portals designed as stop-and-shops for newcomers; exhaustive lists that catalog tens of thousands of links to other lists and links; and primary source sites, which offer specialized facts and nothing but. Here are typical sites that speed up the ancestral quest.
__ PORTALS __
Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com) With $12.3 million in venture cash from Intel and CMGI, Ancestry aims to be everybody's first stop - the Amazon.com of roots. No single site can do it all, but $59.95 a year buys access to heaps of info: 1,500 searchable databases (including biggies like the Social Security Death Index, a list of 60 million deceased Social Security recipients), plus historic maps, research tips, software, CDs, books, and links to a network of veteran, advice-giving genealogists.
Kindred Konnections (www.kindredkonnections.com) This commercial site is heavy on nostalgia, greeting researchers with sepia-toned photos of families-gone-by and the question, "Have you found your ancestors?" Introductory browsing is free, but that's just a tease: $15 a month buys access to 30 million names, archived into an index of family trees, and helps researchers create a Gedcom file, the standard software format for digitized trees.
RootsWeb (www.rootsweb.com) Open source lives! This site is an outgrowth of Roots-L, the genealogical mailing list, whose 10,000 subscribers take part in this grand experiment in family-of-man networking. Running on FreeBSD and Linux, the site costs users nothing and offers a state-by-state roster of links. One nifty feature: Soundex, a search mechanism that locates soundalike derivations of surnames.
__ LISTS __
Cyndi's List (www.cyndislist.com) Founded by Cyndi Howells, a self-taught HTML coder from the state of Washington, this free site began in 1996 as a small list that led beginners to useful online resources. The list has mushroomed since then: It's now 300 pages long, with 41,700 links and 11 megs of data. Cyndi, who cheerfully calls herself obsessive-compulsive, is a fervent genealogist - she once discovered a great-great-great grandfather named Xerxes who escaped a confederate prison camp in a garbage cart.
Genealogy Resources on the Internet (members.aol.com/johnf14246/gen_mail.html) A list of 6,500 email lists from all around the world, whose members will help researchers with almost any question. Some are a little too challenging, though. One recent poster asked: "I need help finding my great-grandparents. I know their name was Smith and they came from somewhere in the East. I don't know when they were born or when they died. Can you help?"
The WorldGenWeb Project (www.worldgenweb.org) A melting-pot site with farsighted vision: Links are divided into 15 world regions and subdivided by country, province, state, and county. Hosting half the world's countries is a logistical tangle - imagine getting help requests in three dozen languages - but the effort is worthwhile. No other site is as comprehensive about collecting the data, energies, and loyalty of genealogy researchers outside the United States.
__ PRIMARY SOURCES __
1835 Cherokee Census Index (home1.gte.net/cicsd/1835.htm) Typical of primary-source sites, this one does an exhaustive accounting job with a narrow slice of humanity: Cherokees who lived east of the Mississippi in 1835. An evocative roster of names is, by itself, worth a visit. Among them: Rinkle Beet, Rustey Belly, and Going Snake.
Christine's Genealogy Website (ccharity.com/indexes/slavesinwills.htm) This small site, on the AfroAmerican Web Ring, contains more than 100 wills chronicling the "holdings" of New World slave owners in the 18th and 19th centuries. From a will recorded on May 20, 1762: "Negroes: Will, Jack, Peter, Sarah, Cate, Tab, Tamor, Ben, Pegg ... one looking glass, pistols, one sword, one bayonet."
Caleb Johnson's Mayflower Web Pages (user.aol.com/calebj) The place to check blueblood credentials: The site lists passengers who came to the New World in the 1620s on the Mayflower, the Fortune, and the Anne. Alas, not every early English immigrant entered high society. For a small fee, more sordid pasts emerge from the civil and criminal court records of Plymouth Colony, 1623 to 1692.
