Now, having said all that, there is a lot to be said for searching on the Internet. It can save you a lot of time and effort. You can get a lot of information online if you know where and how to look.

Census Data

I think the best resource on the internet is Ancestry.com, especially their online census images. Some are indexed and it is very easy to find your ancestors. The 1850 census and all subsequent censuses have the name of the head of household and all individuals living in the home, with their age and place of birth. Some have the birthplace of the mother and father of each individual, their age, occupation and other information. This is a very valuable resource! It can tell you who an individual’s parents were, who their siblings were, where they were born, approximately when they were born and more. Some years list the relationship, such as son, daughter, brother etc. to the head of household. It is really good when you find “mother in law” or “father in law” living with the family. This can sometimes give you the maiden name of the wife. I can’t say enough about how valuable census information is! A subscription to Ancestry.com is required to view their online census data. It is well worth the price! Genealogy.com also offers online census data.

Recently the 1880 census became available for free online at Familysearch.org, the Mormon site, sometimes referred to as “LDS” for “Latter Day Saints”. You can search for an individual in the census by name, place of birth, census place and more. LDS is a pretty good resource for other types of information as well.

There are a couple of sites with links to free census information. They are both about the same and are very good. The free census data is pretty limited but what they do have is very useful. Here are the two sites:

Census Online Website

Census Links Website

Social Security Death Index

Another good resource on the internet is the Social Security Death Index. This is a searchable database of almost all deceased individuals who had a Social Security Card. It is available from several sites. I like Ancestry.com for this also, once you find an individual in the index, they provide a form that you can print off and send to the Social Security Administration to request a copy of an individual’s Social Security application. This is a very valuable tool also! It has the person’s age, spouse's maiden name, father’s name, mother’s maiden name, their address at the time of application and employer. The SSA charges a fee for copying and mailing the application but it is well worth it. You can access the index here - Social Security Death Index
Note: Ancestry.com has now limited this service to paying members only, try LDS SS Index instead.

Internet

A lot of good information is available on the internet. Keep in mind though that some of it may not be that accurate. Some is but a lot of it isn’t. For the most part, information found in an internet search should be taken with a grain of salt and used as the starting point for further research and not as proven fact. There are some exceptions. Rootsweb has transcriptions of some census data, birth, death, marriage and land patents. I would say that this information is pretty accurate except that there are occasional errors due to nearly unreadable information being interpreted as best as the transcriber could do. An example of this is census information. In most cases, the census taker wrote down the information in longhand. Some had atrocious handwriting. In addition, over the years some forms have faded, had things spilled on them and are generally not in very good shape. Also, some of the census takers weren’t that good at spelling and if the people giving the information were illiterate, as a lot of them were a hundred years ago, then the data might be suspect. A good example – I was searching the 1850 Henry County Alabama census for the surname “Hicks”. I could not find it even though I was sure the family lived in that county at that time. I finally found it spelled “Hix”. I can’t tell you the numerous errors in spelling I have seen in census data.

As I stated above, a good place to search is Familysearch.org, the Mormon site. Their search engine is very powerful and user friendly. The information is probably a little more reliable than on most other sites.

Another good site is Ancestry.com’s World Tree. This is a searchable database that is also very powerful and user friendly. It is not quite as reliable and accurate as Familysearch.org but the information found there is good enough to use for further research.

Geneanet is another good place to search. It’s a little different, you search by surname and location and it returns links to personal genealogy websites with the information that you searched for.

Gencircles is a good site, but again it is all personal genealogy information provided by individuals, a good place to get information for further research.

US Genweb Archives Search at Rootsweb. This is a good search engine but the information is currently limited. You can search by state and it returns vital statistics records such as births and marriages, court proceedings, land patents and other data. I like it because you can use quotes “ to search for a specific phrase. You can also use the modifiers “and” and “or”. I like to search for an individual’s name such as “John Smith” in quotes or “John Q. Smith”. I also look for “Smith, John”. Also – Smith and Jones and “Greene County”. And – Smith or Jones and “Greene County”.

The Computerized Ancestor – A searchable database of marriages, not a very large database though.

Findagrave.com - This is a good site to find your ancestors gravesite and information. It's user contributed data so it's not that large yet. I would urge everyone to make a contribution to this site, it has a lot of potential.

Rootsweb Mailing List Search – This will search emails sent to Surname Mailing Lists. Usually goes back 5 or 6 years. Surname mailing lists are good for sharing genealogy information on a particular family name. There are also mailing lists for locations such as counties, states and even some cities. Rootsweb graciously hosts these lists at no charge.

Note that Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, Rootsweb and Familysearch.org all have good search engines and a variety of searchable databases as well as links to other sites with genealogy information.

Search Engines

A search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Altavista etc. can also be a valuable tool if you know how to use it. I prefer Google, I think it’s currently the best and most powerful internet search engine. I like it because you can use quotes “, and the advanced search is very good.

I like to search for an individual’s full name if possible and in different formats. If the name is a fairly common one, use additional search criteria such as a county. Below are some examples:

“John Quincy Smith”
“John Q. Smith”
“John Smith” “Greene County” (note that Google automatically uses “and”, you don’t have to key it in)
“Smith, John Quincy”
“Smith, John Q.”
“Smith, John”
“Smith, John” “Jones, Mary” “Jones, John” – this will limit results to web pages that have all three names.

Also, try variations on spelling. “Smyth, John” etc.

Keep in mind that in most cases, the results returned are personal websites of individuals. The information posted there may or may not be accurate. Usually the owner of the site will have their email address listed and you can contact them for further information or to see if they have documentation for their data.

Genealogy Forums

There are two main forums that seem to be the most popular – GenForum and Ancestry.com’s Forum. I believe that currently GenForum seems to be the most popular and has the greatest number of posts per surname or location. I like their search facility a little better as well. These forums are message boards where you can leave queries or information about people with that surname or who lived in a particular location. If you are requesting or giving information, be sure to make the subject as informative as possible. For example if you are entering a query in the Smith surname forum, on the subject line enter: “John Q. Smith, b. 1857 GA m. Judy Jones b. 1860 AL”.

Keep in mind the subject field may be limited so abbreviation is a must. Everyone who does genealogy research knows that b. means “born”, d. means “died” and m. means “married”. Use these as well as the standard abbreviations for states. Another good example:

“John Q. Smith” b. 1857 Greene County KY”.

In the text of the message, give as much information as possible, birth, death and marriage dates, location, parents siblings, children etc.

There are some other forums on the net, Rootsweb has links to State and County sites, some of them have their own forums or query pages.

Other

There are a lot of other sites on the internet that are very good resources. Some states have sites with genealogy and even surnames. Some have historical information and biographies of significant individuals from their state. Some county websites have similar information.

There are sites that have Civil War company musters, if your ancestor was in the Civil War you may be able to find him on a muster roll. Some of these sites have even further information such as dates of service, discharge date, whether the person was killed or wounded or taken prisoner. Very helpful.

This site Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System is run by the National Parks Service and has listings for all known Civil War Soldiers and Sailors on both sides. A very good resource!

Immigrant ships passenger lists. There are several of these online, if your ancestor came to America on a ship, he may be listed on one of these. They usually list all members of the family that were on a given immigrant ship.

Cemetery Listings – There are quite a few of these now available, usually you can find them from a State or County or City website. They will have links to cemeteries and churches in their area. Some of the cemeteries have lists online of the people buried there. They are usually tombstone inscriptions which list name, birth and death dates and occasionally other information.

Ancient Faces.com – I like this site. You can post old photos of your ancestors there. I believe it is good to share these types of photos with the public. I have a lot of them posted on my site and it is so gratifying to have someone contact me and tell me that they saw a picture of their great grandfather on my site and that they didn’t know what he looked like before! One lady told me she was almost in tears after seeing a photo of her ancestor for the first time! It makes all the work worth while! If you don’t have your own website, Ancient Faces is a good place to share your old photos.

Find-a-Grave is a great place to locate gravesites of your ancestors. You can contribute information as well. It's a completely free site.

The internet is constantly growing, new sites are added everyday. There are probably other genealogy sites that are pretty good that I failed to mention. Be careful though, some sites are not that good, have limited information and charge a high fee for access. Some are not too ethical about posting information about living individuals without their permission. A case in point is LDS Living.com or One Great Family (the site goes by both names). They are not really affiliated with LDS (Church of Latter Day Saints), they just market some LDS materials. Somehow they obtained my genealogy database and posted it on their site, charging a fee for people to access it. I contacted them several times asking that they remove this information but they have refused. My only alternative is to sue them. It’s not really worth it to me financially to take legal action against them at the present time so there’s really nothing I can do. I did file formal complaints with the FTC and FCC but so far that hasn’t done any good. Be careful who you trust with your information!

Genealogy research is fun and can be a good hobby. I like solving mysteries and that is a big part of genealogy. It’s a great hobby and can be beneficial to you and to others if you share your information. It can get to be almost an obsession at times, especially when you find something you’ve been looking for for a long time and it opens up new avenues of research.

I hope this information will help you in your research.