Not too many years ago the pace the pace of doing genealogy was slower. We wrote a letter, and we waited for a reply. We visited libraries, and we took notes by hand because there were no copy machines. With the advent of the Internet, times have changed, but the "recipe" for doing genealogy has not. There are still steps that need to be followed. What's different is not so much the "what" but the "how."
One of the first things a genealogist does is try to find someone else who has researched the family surname. We reach out to our family and to cousins. They usually have information and documents that we do not have. If grandma had five brothers and sisters, each of these siblings probably had correspondence with relatives. They made family photos. They collected family items. Perhaps one of these items is the family Bible that extends the family back three generations. A cousin, the descendant of one of those siblings, may be willing to share family treasures with you. So contact all of them. Ask them to help you clarify dates and fill in missing names. Ask them if they will share photos and documents.
After we contact all the family members we know personally, we seek out distant cousins. Before the Internet, we read queries that people placed in magazines, hoping to find a cousin who had the family history. We wrote to libraries and genealogy societies. Sometimes we found someone who was researching our family. Sometimes we found a library with a surname file that matched our family.
With the Internet, we do this same step, but it is now much faster, and there
are more resources available. When you first use the Internet for your Family
History research, you will be absolutely overwhelmed – don’t let this put
you off. Take a deep breath, slow down, and start again in bite size pieces.
There are now so many aspects of the Internet that you can use, and so many
exciting leads to follow – you will never run out of new sites to try.
As you race along, gathering information on the family, it is important to
write down where you found the information. In the excitement
of finding one fact after another, it's easy to lose track of where you were.
At the minimum, record the URL where you found information, the title, the
author, and the date you downloaded the data. Websites come and go, so look
for additional contact information for the author. Use the simple research
log in the back of this booklet.
It is also important to evaluate what you found. The quality of the information
on the Internet varies from excellent to just plain wrong. Did the author
of the Web page say that Grandpa was born in 1870 and have his first child
in 1880? According to the author, did Grandpa live to be 120 years old? Finding
this type of improbable information should make you question the reliability
of everything on the web page.
A good way to get genealogy information and ask questions about your family tree is to use genealogy mailing lists. A mailing list is basically the same as email, except that anything you send to a list is broadcast (via email) to all other subscribers of that list. At last count there were more than 23,000 genealogical specific mailing lists. Mailing lists generally come in two ways - list mode and digest mode. Unless you like receiving tons of email, always subscribe to digest mode. This mode consolidates a day or two of messages and sends them to you as a single email.
Genealogy mailing lists cover a range of subjects, the main ones are either surnamed based or regional area based. For instance, you might subscribe to the Brooks surname mailing list and also the Greenbrier County, West Virgina regional mailing list. To get information, you simply post a query to the list. You might ask something like, "Does anyone have information about Robert James Brooks, born about 1811 in Greenbrier County, WV?" Be sure to include as much information as you can about place & date of birth, spouse, children, etc. Your hope is that someone else on the list is researching the same family, or has other pertinent information such as census data, a genealogy book , or access to some of the genealogy vital records listings. Part of genealogy is helping other researchers, and mailing lists are a great way for genealogists to collaborate with each other.
Subscribing is free and it is easy to do. For example, to get on the Brooks surname list, all you have to do is to send an email to "brooks-l-request@rootsweb.com" with the single word "subscribe" (don't put in the quotes) as the body of the message. That puts you on the list. To get off it, it is the same procedure with the word "unsubscribe". It doesn't get much easier. Make sure there is no other text in the body of the message (turn off your email signature line if you have one).
Archives of past posting to Rootsweb mailing lists are searchable at
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/. By using this option you can find out if
anyone ever mentioned your ancestor’s name. The archives are “threaded” so
you can follow the discussion from the first mention to the last. This is
an excellent way to make quick contact with cousins.
An extensive listing of genealogy mailing lists can be found on John Fuller's
website: "http://www.rootsweb.com/~jfuller/gen_mail.html".
The source of many of his lists is www.rootsweb.com,
which hosts the bulk of the genealogy mailing lists on the Internet.
WorldConnect is another good "cousin finder" site on Rootsweb. This site allows anyone to post their genealogy research at no charge. You can search the 321 million names on file. When you find a match you click on the link in the "database" column to get the name and email address of the submitter. http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/
The Online Genealogical Database Index from GenTree links to "all known" searchable genealogy databases and is also a great place to find cousins. http://www.gentree.com/gentree.html