Start from the known, and expand to discover the unknown.
Select a few good genealogical Web sites and become familiar with them.
Use your e-mail address and take advantage of the Internet’s networking capabilities. Join a mailing list with which you have a common ethnic, geographic, surname or subject interest.
Become familiar with at least one Web search engine (Google is the best known, and Alta Vista translates best) and at least one Web metasearch site (Dogpile and Metacrawler are good examples). McMillan offers a class in search techniques.
Regularly use Web and e-mail contacts to search for data and research new leads. Practice makes perfect.
Personal pages centered around one family.
Clearinghouses for individuals' research such as Ancestry's World Tree, from where information can be freely viewed and exchanged. The quality of such information, of course, depends on each individual researcher's reliability and documentation.
Official (civil) records, such as the Ellis Island Records. Many official records, such as the Hamburg Passenger Lists database, are available through Ancestry.
Indices to and abstracts of vital records, like the Wood County Vital Statistics Internet Resources project currently under construction, or statewide indices to vital records such as certain Records from Federal and State Resources accessible through Rootsweb.
Information extracted or abstracted from non-official records, such as the Stevens Point Obituary Index or the Palmer List of Merchant Vessels.
Websites created by or on behalf of the local genealogical community, like the USGenWeb Project, or the Heart O’ Wisconsin Genealogical Society .
All genealogy is local. In South Wood County, Wisconsin, for example, McMillan Memorial Library's Local History On-Line has a wealth of digitized documents capturing the historical flavor of the area, and the South Wood County Historical Museum's website describes its collection and services.
Hoaxes and Scams Page of Cyndi's List is a register of common scams. Be careful out there!
If you don't have one, get an e-mail account. They are available free from Yahoo! and Hotmail. Next, you'll want someone to exchange mail with.
Mailing lists are a type of "one to many" communication. Subscribe to a list by sending an e-mail message to the list and following the directions you get back. Once subscribed, you'll get all the messages that any subscriber sends to the mailing list.
USENET newsgroups and Google groups are similar to mailing lists but don't use e-mail for distribution. Go to the site about a subject of interest to you, read posted messages and post your own if you like.
Subscribing to e-zines like Rootsweb Review and the Global Gazette can improve your genealogical knowledge.
The World Wide Web is what most people think of as "the Internet." The Web's (relative) ease of use and graphic capabilities account in large part for the Internet's mass popularity.
McMillan Memorial Library's Local Genealogy Resources highlights McMillan's genealogy collection and includes websites of local organizations that might be of help for your research.
Cyndi’s List, the best known subject guide to genealogical sites, covers over 250,000 sites in over 180 categories. Use it.
RootsWeb, home of Roots-L, the largest genealogical mailing list, also has a search engine for the USGenWeb archives and is the oldest Internet genealogy service.
Social Security Death Index is probably the Web's best known genealogical database.
Ancestry Inc., a major genealogical publisher, has search engines to numerous print sources as well as its own Ancestry World Tree. Some parts of the site are restricted to subscribers.
Vital Records Information shows how to obtain official records of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces records for each U.S. county. How to obtain birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates provides this information for records held at the state level.
Family Search, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is immensely popular and worthwhile.
Librarian's Guide to Helping Patrons with Genealogical Research discusses not just an online perspective, but research generally.
Genealogy and Family History Internet Web Directory considers the best university-related sites.
From Rootsweb's Wood County site: Help Me I Am New, How to research in PortageCo WI & WoodCoWI website, and How to navigate on a website.
With a little imagination, and the help of some of the above sites, you’ll also find many links to subjects not directly related to genealogy but still extremely useful, such as:
Sites with maps and gazetteer information, such as an Atlas of the German Empire and gazetteers, e.g., the GEOnet Names Server, and Kartenmeister.
Phone, address and e-mail lists - McMillan Library’s list includes many of the best sites.
Librarian's Index to the Internet, the best source for identifying quality websites.
This program can be found at : http://www.mcmillanlibrary.org/programs/genealogy.html
Last revised 01/16/08