This
site is maintained for the convenience of myself and my
friends and those who attend my lectures on genealogy. I find
it
is difficult to type in a long series of URLs without error and
aggravating as well. So I have started putting my interesting
sites here. I have omitted fancy graphics to make
the pages
load quickly.
If
you find any broken links, please let me know immediately.
This
is Page One which features: General Sites, locating people,
places,
resources; death record and obituary problems; and sites with
free printable forms, newsletters, and learning programs, free
email.
Link
to
Page 2 Page
Two
features, 1798 tax lists, Census problems, Immigration
Problems, Old Maps, Military Records, Sites on the origin of
names and naming patterns, plus a group of little known sites
with very interesting records.
Link
to Page 3Page 3
Features preservation of old documents, pictures, adoption
sites, and a number of miscellaneous places to find great
information.
Link
to Page
4Page 4 features some
interesting sites with unusual information.
Link
to
Page 5Page 5 features links to
help you find
newspapers all over the United States and the world.
General
Sites
These are some of the top
genealogy
sites on the Internet.
Internet
Sites by Kip Sperry These are sites associated with
FamilySearch.org with blogs and much of general interest.
Family
Search (LDS) You need to know that most of the material
recently added is part of the massive Morman plan to abstract vital
records from all over, make them easily accessible and free.
More are added monthly. It is easy to
check what
databases are already there.
The databases are NOT necessarily complete. For example,
they fewer California marriages than Ohio Marriages. You need to
check all of these. Look at the record
carefully. Most of the new stuff is extracted from their microfilms and
highly reliable. See the film number, look it up and see what
the film is for. It is says that film number is for Hamilton
County marriages, then that is the source of the record.
There may be transcription errors, as always. But
this is a major new source which many people are not taking full
advantage of.
Lots of Interesting Links:
Genealogy
is…..
This site also
has links to a fabulous site where people will do limited lookups on
CDs for you. It also has
access to other resources.
Telephone
Directories, White pages and Yellow Pages
This
subject has
gotten much more complicated. There used to be several sites where you
could look up a telephone number or address easily, quickly and free.
Unfortunately, the free part of that is mostly disappeared.
The
best thing for you that I can find is now:http://www.theultimates.com/white/
This subject seems to change monthly so if
one of these doesn't work try another.
Super pages.com has the
info but seems to
want you to pay for almost everything. www.SuperPages.com
Be Careful, some of the items are
not free. These two are primarily
for other countries. http://www.infobel.com/world/default.asp
Great site for telephone directories US and World International telephone
directories http://numberway.com/
This is one for investigating someone. It was sent to me with
this message: I have tried the $2.00 one
and have had no issues with unauthorized credit card use. If
you
get the discounted offer then you have signed up for a monthly fee and
service which you probably don't want to do. . http://www.peoplefinders.com/ Peoplefinder has a more
up to date database. But http://www.peoplesmart.com
has similar information. If you find different ages on
Peoplesmart and peoplefinder, the older one is probably right.
There are a lot of newspaper sites out there, but this one specializes
in Historical Newspapers. Note the advanced search feature. http://www.elephind.com/
For old newspapers in other areas, check with your local library.
Most libraries subscribe to Historical Newspapers site. You
can usually use this from home with a library card. Ask your
local library. It has searchable newsapapers from 1690 to 1920.
It may be available as a part of NewsBank. These are paid sites but
probably available free at your library. The bad news is that
these newspapers are all indexed by Optical Character Recognition
software. That means that the software has trouble with the old print
and does not always index correctly. John Glover will be indexed
as John Clover, for example.
This Google site has the newspapers arranged by name with links.
Paid Newspaper Sites
Most of these have lists of the newspapers and dates so you can check
ahead of time. They all have free trials or temporary
memberships. So this route does not have to be very expensive.
There are a lot of books which have recently been digitalized.
They
are either old enough to be out of copyright or the authors have given
permission to have them copied. Many of these are useful
genealogy
texts.
WorldCat is a worldwide
catalogue of books. It tells you the closest library which has a
book,
and if there are digitalized versions of it online.
http://www.worldcat.org/
FamilySearch.org Free Bookshttps://books.familysearch.org
If you have trouble using the book, you can download it and use it
easier. Just delete it when you are finished. If the book
is large,
it is slow to search and they have a tendency to lock up my computer if
you try to use them on line. Do not try to use with an AOL
browser.
Use your Internet Explorer instead. Also check the catalog at
this
site for links to many of their free books on line.
Google Books at http://books.google.com/ Some of
these are free, some are not. But it is a good place to look for
old books.
Heritage Quest has about 25,000
genealogy books digitalized and searchable. This is not free but it is
available free through a lot of public libraries. Most likely you can
have remote access to this with a library card. If not, find
another
library close by or a state library which offers this with remote
access to residents.
Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/texts
This has a lot of books. Not all of them are useful for
genealogy. Do
a search for the book title. Or click on American
Libraries. Half way
down the page, there is a place to browse by title name. These
are
transcribed books which makes them faster to search. One
advantage is
that I have found the indexes are not complete in a lot of old
books.
For example, in the Early Germans in New Jersey, I found a number of
names by searching that were not in the index. But some of the
transcriptions are OCR. This can be a problem because the Optical
Character Recognition reads Clover for Glover etc.
Various
Death Record,
Obituary, Tombstone, and Probate Problems
The title of this site is Online
Searchable Death Indexes and Records. There
is a page for each state
and this will give you a lot of places to search for DC and obits etc.
Excellent site and is kept current unlike many sources.
Note that Rootsweb no longer has
the SSDI database. It is still on the LDS site at https://www.familysearch.org Scroll down to Browse by Location,
then to United States. On that page scroll down to United States
Social Security Death Index. It appears to be out of alphabetical
order at this time. It is just before the 1890 census.
Probate
Problems: [Now includes some
naturalization and guardianship indexes.] This is mostly a set of
indexes but does include some actual records. Click here: SAMPUBCO
I
have always been overwhelmed by the
knowledge of Elizabeth Shown Mills and her ability to communicate it.
She now has a website with links to many of her articles speeches and
TV appearances. HistoricPathways
The
best free online classes on genealogy
can be found on the LDS Site. Go to www.familysearch.org
and scroll down until you see classes in the middle of the page.
Start looking for Blogs on Cyndislist
There are hundreds more on special interests like DNA, Cemetery
Repair, Newbies, Advanced, Irish Genealogy, etc
Blogs change rapidly. Google is
your best friend to find them. If you have tested your DNA at
FTDNA, for example, sign up for their blog or whatever they are calling
it this week. They periodically have webinars etc. This is pretty much
true of various companies you might use. Ancestry runs a blog and
sponsers videos on Youtube which can be very useful.
Learning
and Newsletters and Blogs
I love Newsletters and blogs but I subscribe to several and I don't
always have time to read them and they mess up my mailbox. So I
got a special email address just for blogs. Then they sit there
until I am ready to read them.
This is a great site for anyone with grandchildren who would like to
learn more about their heritage. This site is sponsored by
the
National Genealogical Society. http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/youth.htm
Richard
Eastman’s Newsletter-one
of the best deals on the internet. He has a free version and a paid
version. Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter
Go to
this site and sign up for the free version. You can sign up
for
the paid version if you think you like it.
The newest rage is blogs which are the same as newsletters are far as I
can see. Anyway, google blog [special interest] to find one for
you. There must be hundreds.
Computer
Problems
www.yahoo.com
This is a site for free email. You should
have at least one extra
email address that you use for lists, etc. It will cut down on
the spam and yahoo has a good spam filter. If it gets bad, you can dump
the address and get another free one. Also if you
have to
change your server you can still get your mail. Also try
gmail.com
which is free on google. Each has certain advantages.
Spyware
Control Programs Download
both
of these and run them once a week. One of the main reasons for
slow computer functioning on the net is ad ware. In all cases,
the free version is probably fine. I am using malwarebytes and
have been satisfied.