Email address: caroline@thegoodwebguide.com

Website: www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/genealogy/

Any errors are the responsibility of SHS website only.

By all means head immediately for a website that offers a name-search facility, type in the name you are interested in and hope for a result. Don't necessarily assume, however, that this is the best way of getting helpful information. One reason is that the majority of websites offering this facility are based in the United States, and although there are many families in this country with relatives across the Atlantic, there are still many more who have no American connections whatsoever. Nobody in the US is, therefore, likely to be researching those names, unless perhaps they are pursuing a lateral rather than a vertical (father-to-father) search. As the information contributed to name-search sites is mostly volunteered by individuals, you see the problem.

If you are serious about your family history you will need to do rather more digging, and the place to start is with civil registrations of birth, death and marriages, which with

some expenditure on certificates, should lead you back reasonably painlessly to somewhere between 1837 and 1875, providing lots of details and addresses along the way. In this chapter you will find the online sources that can help with this process.

Before civil registration began, parish registers provided the main records of an individual's life. The largest collection of these found online is in the IGI (see pp.36-7) but we have listed other sources to pursue. Wills, obituaries, passenger lists, land records, and of course the census provide further fruitful areas of search, with an increasing number of indexes and transcriptions, and even original records, available for online consultation.

Apart from sites dealing with these official records, there are myriad sources of names and possible connections on the net. The majority are derived from personal family trees, which are usually available online either as web pages or in GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication) form.

Other people, instead of confining their search to their own family trees, compile one-name studies, which seek all occurrences, past and present, of a single surname, anywhere in the world. More often than not, they are most useful to the private researcher as a means of eliminating the inclusion of'wrong* ancestors or branches of the family tree. You may, however, become fascinated by the wider aspects of the search, such as the geographical migration of the name or its persistence within certain professions, and wish to launch a one-name study of your own. If so, you can register with the Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS, see p. 68), on the understanding that you will undertake to collect all references worldwide, not restricted by family or locality, and that you will personally deal with all reply-paid enquiries sent to you.

As a user of one-name studies websites, be warned that each site will only be as good as the person/people who contribute to it, so you may find that they are disorganised, that a lot of information is repeated rather than consolidated, and that response times are slow. Depending on the contributors, they may also, of course, be inaccurate. More usually, though, the sort of personalities attracted to such a Herculean task are meticulous, persistent and knowledgeable. Moreover, because one-name studies sites assemble information on a global scale, they are likely to become enormous, unless they are dealing with an unusual surname. Having offered those warnings, however, it may turn out that you find exactly the site, names and personal contacts you need and your researches will accordingly take a huge leap forward.

In addition to one-name sites, thousands of individuals have by now posted their own personal family trees on the web. They are also well worth exploring, especially those posted here in the UK, in case you find that someone else is researching the same branch of a family tree as you and is perhaps further along with their research. Allowing for the need to check the connections they have made (and good researchers will always document their sources), a lucky encounter of this sort could prove to be a shortcut to filling in a whole area of your own pedigree.

Alternatively, if you have already done lots of work yourself and have files of well-documented genealogical information about your own ancestors, you may want to post your own family tree on the web. You don't have to set up an independent website to do this. There are several website-hosting services that specialise in genealogy, not all requiring a subscription but usually needing to receive your file in GEDCOM form. There are websites on p.i36 that tell you how to create your own GEDCOM.

Other sources of leads on names are the thousands of mailing lists, message boards or individual email contacts dedicated to single surnames, putting you in touch with people with shared interests, and with whom you can communicate, both asking and answering questions, sharing information and generally enjoying the whole field of ancestral research. There is more information about joining these groups on pp.38-40.

Finally, I have listed the sites where you can find genealogical angels: people with reference works such as trade directories, census indexes, and monumental records, who are willing to search their sources for your ancestors.

Ancestry.com www.ancestry.com

This site is reviewed first in this chapter, not because it should be your immediate destination, but because you are likely to be lured there by the search boxes promising access to millions of records that you will surely trip across very soon after starting to surf other genealogy sites. And secondly it appears here because the range of record types contained in Ancestry.com's databases mean that it covers probably every sub-section within this chapter.

A comment on the star rating of this site: Ancestry.com is the big daddy of commercial genealogy sites and if you want names, they are here by the million, culled from an enormous range of sources, including primary records and submitted data. The difficulty for a UK user is that unless you have American connections, you are unlikely to find much here of use, and a lot to distract (though see details of the UK/Irish Collection below). To access the majority of the information you need to take out a subscription, though there are sections that are free, so it is worth exploring even ifyou're not planning to subscribe. The availability of the US census must be one of the key reasons for joining if you can make use of it.

A word of warning about the cancelling of subscriptions, including a 'free 14-day trial' for which you need to hand over your credit card details. You are told to unsubscribe by dialling a toll-free number in Utah, which will not work from

outside the US. The alternative is to phone a Utah-based telephone number, which can prove both expensive and frustrating. Although it is difficult to find mention of it on the site, international customers (that is, those outside the US) can email support@ancestry-inc.com to cancel. You must provide your full name, email address, username and say that you are an international customer. Even then, reports suggest that it is still worth checking your credit card statement to ensure that your subscription has been cancelled.

The homepage is quite busy and cluttered. The prominent search box that greets you is not a bad place to start, or use the tabs across the top of the page to get to the section you want. If you want to find a site map, click on Contact Us and the box that appears has tabs, including one for site map. In general, navigation is quite obscure with no obvious way of navigating back to lists once you follow a link.

Search lets you put in a first and second name, or simply a surname, specify a locality or not as you choose, and then press the search button. Tested with one reasonably unusual surname, it produced 94 Ancestry World Tree entries, 208 US Social Security Death Index entries, 211 current US Telephone and Address Listings, and links to message boards and that name's 'Surname Community'. The search also produced hits in a number of other categories, such as Census records, military records, periodicals, newspapers and so on. Using the 'back' button and then refining the search by adding a first name, the number of hits was drastically reduced, to two current telephone/address listings, the message boards and the Surname Community (which proved to have the 94 entries). One hit in each case was apparently available in Vital & Church Records and Biography & History, but this was as far as it was possible to go without paying.

UK/Irish Collection From October 2001 Ancestry.com started to introduce some UK and Irish material, including parish and probate records, the Irish Famine Index, Pallet's Marriages and Baptisms. Access to these can be obtained by buying an annual UK/Ireland subscription at $69.95 P^er annum, and thereafter you will be billed quarterly. If you are already a subscriber you can add these new databases for $29.95. Before signing up though it is worth taking a close look at what records are available as they are by no means comprehensive. Checking by county you may find that they have only one or two parish registers relating to the area you're interested in, or some marriage licence details for a very small time period. More records are likely to be added regularly but it has some way to go before this is more than a hit and miss affair for UK researchers. The references to UK Civil Registration records are true but somewhat misleading: Ancestry.com hosts a copy of the FreeBMD database (see p. 56), which is located on RootsWeb, but if you access via Ancestry.com, which offers a better search facility, you can Still reach these records for free, without needing to subscribe.

Learn introduces various family history resources, principally the Ancestry Library, which could be useful. Articles from the archives of Ancestry Magazine can be accessed without a subscription.

Share provides much of the data for the site, with individuals posting their personal information on the message boards, contributing to the Ancestry World Tree or joining the Research Registry. This is where the possibility for unreliable information is inevitably introduced.

Record offers online website space for your family tree and a means of staying in touch with your family worldwide. The software provided online is increasingly sophisticated and flexible in the reports it can produce, and if you are collaborating with someone elsewhere the ability to share your information online is attractive.

Shop takes you to publications, software packages and other products of interest to researchers, all for sale at the click of a button, and gives you the opportunity to sign up for the ProductWatch newsletter. Be aware that using this US-based facility will probably mean incurring import taxes and will certainly involve carriage costs.

FamilyHistory.com and MyFamily.com are both associated websites, which are accessible from within this website.