Introduction
More than 20 years ago, my mother asked my brother and me, “This Internet thing you all are always talking about: Can it help me with my genealogy?”
My brother and I were already deep into online discussion groups about writing (me), archaeology (Bob), music, astronomy (both of us), and other topics.
Immediately after Mother asked, I knew two things: The answer was yes and I would have to write it all down for her. And that is how this book came to be.
Who Should Read This Book
The early editions of this book assumed you knew how to do genealogy, but not how to use the Internet. Since that time, commercial online services and the Internet have added, expanded, revised, and changed what they offer, as well as how and when they offer it. From having to use a dial-up connection over a modem in 1992, to cable and satellite connections, to today’s iPhone, we’ve come a long way. Social networking and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messaging make sharing your data easy and almost irresistible. So in this edition, the author assumes you know most Internet technologies and programs and that you want to know how to use them to do your genealogy. I’ve gone from a “what button to push” approach to a “why would you want to use that” one.
The potential for finding clues, data, and other researchers looking for your same family names has increased exponentially in the last decade. Since 2000, push technology, streaming video, blogs, podcasts, social networking, and indexed document scans have radically changed what can be found on the Internet and how we search for it. If you feel you need formal instruction in researching family history, online courses, from basic self-paced text to college-level instruction, can now make that happen.
In short, online genealogy has never been better, and it’s a good time to try your hand at it! Let’s look at some examples of how online genealogy works.
Bill Ammons’ Story
Bill Ammons is a friend of mine who used a few hints on online genealogy from me to break down a brick wall in his genealogy research. Here is what he wrote to me about his quest:
“I started my genealogy research 16 months ago with the name of the only grandparent I knew from my childhood. The journey has taken me from knowing a very small family to discovering an enormously large family. I have learned a lot about history, our society, family secrets, and what not to say in e-mails, even jokingly, to family. I have hit roadblocks and gotten through some, while others are still being researched,” Bill Ammons wrote. Some roadblocks will never be resolved, he noted, as you will discover that documents were destroyed in the Civil War or in mysterious fires at courthouses or newspaper offices.
However, on your journey, you, too, will become a collector of websites, books on dead people, and American history.
“Roadblocks are very interesting challenges, in that one must begin to be creative in their research to find clues to get them through the roadblocks,” Bill said. “If the information on the Internet leads to roadblocks, then try going to the county historical society office and then to the county courthouse to look for wills, land documents, bible records, newspaper articles, and even personal letters. I have found old bible records at the historical societies that have provided clues to names I was uncertain of and even provided insights into cemetery records. I started my journey with a simple posting to the Horry County, South Carolina Historical Society home page (www.hchsonline.org/).
“From a simple posting on the message board of the four family surnames (Ammons, Denton, Martin, and Tompkins), I received a response the next day that solved the Martin branch of my tree to 1810. My cousin is, in fact, one of the contributors of documents to the Horry Historic Society Site. Sometimes, one can find a new family member and find genealogy at the same time,” Bill said.
“The next day brought another surprise when I received an e-mail from a gentleman in Atlanta and he provided the Denton branch of my family tree. His mother was my grandmother’s sister. I never met my grandmother’s sisters,” he continued. “But this posting yielded another new family member and also received information about the Denton family as a bonus. This family member pointed me to documents and newspaper articles that were available online that provided personal insight as to the possibilities that my grandmother and grandfather were Native Americans.
“Then I had to really get into the digging mindset to start finding information and documents on the other surnames. The Ammons surname has taken me from the coast of South Carolina to the Appalachian Mountains and back to Sampson County, North Carolina. I never had any idea that the Ammons family came from North Carolina because I grew up with the understanding that the Ammons were “Black Irish” that migrated to South Carolina. The real surprise has been in the documentation I have obtained that does not support this idea we were “Black Irish.”
Census reports from Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com) were well worth the monthly cost for the subscription, Bill said. These census reports are searchable and easily accessed, even with a dial-up connection. The census reports provide a road map of where the family lived in different decades. Also, the census reports tell something about the family’s living conditions, employment, education, and neighbors. From these documents, Bill was able to trace the family from 1780 to the 1920s. He found the Ammons family as early as 1780 in Sampson County, North Carolina. Next, they migrated to Marlboro County, South Carolina, after the American Revolution. In the next generation, the children migrated to Macon and Cherokee counties of North Carolina.
Bill found documents from the American Revolution at Wallace State College in Hanceville, Alabama. This community college has a tremendous records area on the American Revolution and the Civil War, as well as access to the 2.5 million microfilm reels from the Genealogical Society of Utah. The college also has courses in family and regional history. These records showed Bill that his Ammons family received a land grant in Marlboro County because they served in the American Revolution.
Using Cyndi’s List (www.cyndislist.com) to help search the Native American connections, Bill found it a great help when researching roots connected to the federally recognized tribes. The issue of researching Native American heritage is a separate and interesting journey, which can involve discovering your genetic markers, such as Asian shovel teeth, anatomical knot, and genetically transmitted diseases.
Another helpful resource was the Melungeons page (www.melungeon.org/), he said. “Some people are really confused about this group of folks that lived in North Carolina. The more I read about the forgotten Portuguese, the more interesting this hidden part of America’s history became in tracking the family history,” Bill said.
Bill’s journey brought him to the Waccamaw Indian People of South Carolina and the Croatans of Sampson County, North Carolina. He is a tribal member of the Waccamaw. Among the helpful sites were the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library’s Documenting the American South page (www.docsouth.unc.edu/). This site has a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) version of a book called The Croatan Indians of Sampson County, North Carolina. Their Origin and Racial Status. A Plea for Separate Schools, written in 1916 by George Edwin Butler.
The online book was a jewel of a find in this surname search. The book discusses the Croatans having a possible connection with the lost colonists of Roanoke, which led Bill to research the census records again. The census places family in the correct place at the correct time to strengthen this argument of where the family originated. Currently, Bill plans to continue the research focused on the county, state, and federal records of the time. A big plus was the photos in the book, with people who resemble family members that Bill knows today!
“In my research for records, I have been to the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh, North Carolina. (A word to the wise: Don’t take any ink pens and/or briefcases; you will not be allowed into the records area.) Believe me—it is a tremendous treat to see the historical records that remain. The information you can discover is well worth the frustration,” he said.
As you can see, Bill Ammons’ journey took him to many different online and offline resources: Bill took what he knew from his own immediate family, plus the family legends and gossip, to begin searching for the original records he needed. He went to some resources in person, such as the North Carolina Archives and Wallace State College Library, but only after online research told him that’s where he needed to go. This is an excellent example of genealogy online.
Where Computers Come In
Databases, online services, online card catalogs, and bulletin boards are changing the brick wall syndrome, that frustrating phase of any lineage search where the information needed seems unavailable. Genealogists who have faced the challenges and triumphed are online, helping others.
State governments and the federal government have recently started to put data, such as death records, veterans’ records, and so on, in computer-readable databases, which can then be accessible via the Internet. The Bureau of Land Management, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration are just a few examples of government sites that can help the family historian.
The United States alone has numerous genealogical societies that trace people’s descent. Some of these are national, but many more are local or regional, such as the Tennessee Valley Genealogical Society or the New England Historical Society. Others are specific to certain names. Many patriotic organizations, such as the Daughters of the Confederacy, limit membership to descendants of a particular historical group. Many of these groups offer courses in genealogy, which can help you with online and offline research.
There’s no denying that the computer has changed nearly everything in our lives, and the avocation and vocation of genealogical research is no exception. Further, the Internet has added to the ways a genealogist can research, as with Bill Ammons’ example, to find those elusive primary sources that are essential to any family history. This book explores many different networks, services, and websites that can help you in your pursuit of your ancestry.
Stories about how online communities have helped people in their genealogical research abound. The following sections provide some examples.
DearMYRTLE Finds a Patriot
DearMYRTLE, a daily genealogy columnist on the Internet, was helping a friend move files, data, and programs from an old computer to a new one. In the course of the conversation, DearMYRTLE’s friend wondered aloud what online genealogy could do for him, but expressed doubt anything useful could turn up online.
Then the conversation turned to the new U.S. quarters celebrating the states in the order they joined the Union, specifically, the one with the Delaware patriot Caesar Rodney on the reverse.
“Who was he?” asked DearMYRTLE’s friend.
“All right,” DearMYRTLE replied, “let’s run a test. Your wife here will look up Caesar Rodney in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You look him up on your old computer using Microsoft Encarta 97. I’ll look him up on the Internet with your new computer.”
Faster than the other two could use either a book or a CD-ROM, DearMYRTLE found a transcription of a letter from George Washington to Rodney.
Nancy’s Story
Nancy is a friend of mine from high school who knows more about computers and the Internet than I do, but not quite so much about genealogy. When her stepmother died recently, Nancy got a large box of her father’s memorabilia and photos. She asked me about genealogy, and I showed her some good genealogy sites on the Internet on her laptop computer.
I didn’t think much more about it until she called me a few weeks later in considerable excitement. She had not only found the USGenWeb (www.usgenweb.org) site for her father’s home county in Texas, but also that the moderator of the site had known both her father and her grandfather. She was scanning in the old photos and e-mailing them to the fellow, and he was identifying people in them left and right. One was of Nancy’s grandfather as a child. Another showed her father as a teenager. Every day, the USGenWeb moderator was helping her fill in more holes in her family history.
These are just two examples of how you, too, can do online genealogy.
What This Book Covers
This book covers the techniques used by Bill, Pat, and Nancy, as well as ways to teach yourself genealogy, learn from experts, and create “cousin bait” such as blogs and tweets.
It also takes you on a tour of some specific resources that can help you research your family history online, publish it, and share it.
A Quick Look at This Book
The chapters go from the simplest to more complex facets of genealogy in Part I. In Parts II and III, you will find some “hands-on” guides to using specific resources.
Notes and boxes along the way give you some details that help you do all this more quickly and easily.
Chapter 1: Beginning a Genealogy Project For those just becoming interested in how to research family history, this chapter will go over the steps you need to take. If you have been doing genealogy for a while, still glance at the chapter. Please be sure to take this one idea from the chapter, regardless of your experience level: BACK UP YOUR WORK REGULARLY.
Chapter 2: Software You’ll Need This chapter will help you learn about some of the software that can make genealogy both online and offline easier to research, save, and share.
Chapter 3: Ethics, Privacy, and Law in Genealogy This subject can get sticky as you pursue your family tree. When you find crime, illegitimacy, and surprise ancestors, you are faced with some interesting choices.
Part II: Using the Internet for Genealogy
Chapter 4: Genealogy Education This chapter covers the online and offline ways to improve your level of genealogy expertise. From simple self-guided tours to formal accreditation, you can pursue genealogy education in many ways.
Chapter 5: Revving Up Search Engines This chapter will show you how to effectively use any search engine, from Bing to Google to Yahoo!, to find general and specific topics, such as online genealogy pages about a surname or where a state’s wills are recorded.
Chapter 6: Talk to Me: Twitter, Skype, IM, and Google Real-time communication on the Internet, smart phones, and virtual worlds have really changed how genealogists connect to each other.
Chapter 7: Fun with E-mail: Mail Lists, Newsletters, and More Worldwide, continual discussions on any topic you can imagine is one more resource. And, of course, an electronic query can be your best tool online!
Chapter 8: Social Networking Professional and hobbyist genealogists alike are using social networking tools to share and educate throughout the Internet. You can, too!
Chapter 9: Blogging Your Genealogy: Sites, Software, and More The perfect recipe for cousin bait is a lively, fact-filled blog. Here’s how to use it to further your research into your ancestry!
Chapter 10: DNA Genealogy The latest tool in the genealogy box is using mtDNA, YDNA, and autosomal DNA tests to find living and past relatives.
Part III: The Nitty-Gritty: Places to Find Names, Dates, and Places
Chapter 11: Vital Records and Historical Documents This chapter explores how and where to get those important government documents and certificates.
Chapter 12: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: FamilySearch.org The Mormon Church has one of the best online databases and library card catalogs on the Web. Learning to use it can save you a lot of time and effort!
Chapter 13: Ellis Island Online: The American Family Immigration History Center Forty percent of Americans have an ancestor who passed through Ellis Island. This chapter explores how to find out if yours is one of them and the best tools to use for the search. (Hint: They aren’t on the official Ellis Island site!) Learning to use Ellis Island will also help you find ships’ lists for other ports.
Chapter 14: Online Library Card Catalogs and Services This is not your grandmother’s library with paper cards in a physical catalog. You can search and use databases from your library or at home; libraries truly are information centers now.
Chapter 15: International Genealogy Resources All our families come from somewhere. In the United States, when you get “back to the boat,” you need to know how to search in the “old country.”
Chapter 16: Ethnic Genealogy Resources As you’ve seen in this Introduction, certain ethnic groups present special challenges in family history, but online resources can help you overcome them.
Chapter 17: The National Genealogical Society This chapter explores one American resource that has education, data, networking, and more. Learning about the NGS can also help you understand how local genealogical societies work.
Chapter 18: Ancestry.com and RootsWeb The oldest online genealogy community, RootsWeb, is part of the largest commercial genealogy company, Ancestry.com. This company also runs Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com, and other sites full of resources for the family historian. This chapter will look at what is free, what is cheap, and what is expensive.
Chapter 19: Genealogical Publishing Houses and Their Sites This chapter will show you the companies that publish genealogies and how you can do it yourself!
Chapter 20: A Potpourri of Genealogy A whirlwind tour of sites that you’ll want to visit, use, and maybe bookmark!
Appendix A: Genealogical Standards from the National Genealogical Society