Eastbayri.com

I liken online genealogy research to gambling. I can spend hours surfing the Internet and find nothing. But, just as I get disgusted and decide to call it quits, something amazing comes up and I’m excited and hooked all over again.

Researching online is convenient and safe and will save you money and time. Everyone knows what gems there are to be found online, with more appearing every day. In fact, that’s probably the number one tip when researching online. Check and recheck the great websites you find on a regular basis, because new information is being adding all the time.

And, don’t stop because you’re successful. I’m guilty of this. I find that vital record or historical fact or map, download it and print it out and think I’m done. But, keep going and check all the other possibilities in your search, too.

The biggest problem with online research is that those possibilities are endless. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to know where to begin. Stick with the websites that are guaranteed to help you the most — for those of us in New England, specifically, that’s the New England Historic Genealogical Society at newenglandancestors.org. For Canada, try canadagenweb.org and thatsmyfamily.ca.

For general research, you want to use ancestry.com, footnote.com (which was recently acquired by Ancestry), familysearch.org, Heritage Quest, the U.S. Gen Web Project, worldvitalrecords.com and the National Archives at www.archives.gov.

For overseas help, check out the worldgenweb.org, genuki.org.uk, stevemorse.org, scotlandspeople.gov.uk, jewishgen.org, feefhs.org (The Federation of East European Family History Societies), daddezio.com (no www) for Italy, germanroots.com, findmypast.com, genline.com and so many more.

Portal sites offer links to other websites. Keep track of these and use them often. genealogylinks.net offers over 50,000 sites that you can browse by region (U.S., Canada, Australia, U.K. and Ireland, Continental Europe, etc.). genealogybranches.com is Joe Beine’s categorized guide to tons of genealogy records and how to get them along with tips and research guides.

www.progenealogists.com/genealogysleuthb.htm is a favorite of mine, too. It lists sites by topic and indicates with a $ if they are paid or free. And, of course, the greatest portal site, with 282,000 links for family history research, is cyndislist.com.

linkpendium.com calls itself “The Definitive Directory” and, at this time, has 9,212,001 genealogy links.

The amount of information out there is staggering. And, with everyday genealogists like you and me uploading information, too, there is information on your family lines out there just waiting to be discovered.

I found one of the most amazing family genealogies online for my Ploof/Plouffe family — with complete source information! It’s probably saved me years of research in libraries and government offices in New York and Canada. I discovered a diary for my fifth great-grandfather when I Googled his name and came across a weather study done of colonial weather patterns. I found a cousin living a half hour away I didn’t know I had on a message board at Roots Web.

Search engines

When you exhaust all the genealogy websites, it’s time to search the Web. Search engines are a blessing and a curse. They can find the most arcane information, but are limited in what they search for. In other words, use more than one search engine. None of them will search every corner of the Web.

There are numerous search engines — just a few, alphabetically, are AltaVista, Ask.com, Ask Jeeves, Bing, Cuil, Dogpile, GigaBlast, Google and Yahoo.

Then, there are search engines for the search engines — try searchengineguide.com and linkpedia.com for search engines listed by topic. Searchenginecolossus.com is an international directory of search engines around the world. Wikipedia has a good list of search engines, too.

Metasearches

A metasearch allows you to search multiple databases at once, either from a single site, such as ancestry.com or any of the other genealogical databases, or from a search engine for the search engines, such as webcrawler.com, which takes your search terms and runs them through multiple popular sites such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com and more and gives you the results. Zapmeta.com is similar, but searches Yahoo, Bing, Cuil, GigaBlast, AltaVista, Entireweb and others. MetaCrawler searches Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart and others.

Or, try the Family Finder at genealogy.com/ifftop.html. It can sometimes be helpful and other times annoying. In a search of my grandmother’s name, I added birth and death dates and it included matches to the 1850 census, when she wasn’t alive yet.

Looking for a book? The best metasearch of libraries is available at worldcat.org. Search through 1.5 billion items in one search.

Getting the search under way

Once you begin the search, always read the parameters of the database (you don’t want to search for a Civil War vet in a military database that started for World War I). Sometimes, the title doesn’t reflect the entire database. For instance, because of a fire, the 1890 census only includes bits and pieces (6,160 records) from Alabama, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas.

Don’t be afraid to search for a name without a location. It’s possible your ancestor lived somewhere you aren’t aware of. I had a family that moved back and forth between New England and Canada, which wasn’t reflected in the census data.

On a database that doesn’t offer a search feature, you can hone in on what you want with a site: or inurl: search. For instance, I used Google and typed in site:rootsweb.com Massachusetts Rust and got 52 results instead of wading through the 8,949,440 I got on the website when I typed in one Rust name.