Genealogy Online

by Elizabeth Crowe

  –Alta Flynt

  RootsWeb

  How would you like a place where you can search dozens of databases of genealogical materials, look through hundreds of genealogical webpages, and subscribe to thousands of mailing lists? How about a place where you can publish your own page, upload your own data, and create your own mailing list? And all for free!

  Note

  www.rootsweb.com and www.rootsweb.org take you to the same site: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com.

  Welcome to RootsWeb (www.rootsweb.org). Once upon a time, RootsWeb was a site for a group of people working at the research center RAND who dabbled in genealogy on the side and had a club for family history. They had a little mailing list, hosted by the University of Minnesota, and a little database on the RAND server for their club. That was 20 years ago. Today, RootsWeb is the largest all-volunteer genealogy site on the Web.

  RootsWeb started and continues as a volunteer effort. But the costs of servers, disk space, and connections got so high that what was once a little club of genealogy enthusiasts that worked together merged with Ancestry.com. It’s not a completely black-and-white situation; there are still plenty of transcribing projects that are free to access, such as ship’s passenger lists, census transcriptions, and so on. And Ancestry.com hosts some of the free stuff—for example, all the message boards. For the RootsWeb user, little has really changed except the format.

  Note

  Remember, any time you post genealogical data anywhere, you still need to be sure that data on living people isn’t included in your submissions because anyone can copy publicly posted data.

  The mission of RootsWeb is summed up in the following statement, published on its home page: “The RootsWeb project has two missions: To make large volumes of data available to the online genealogical community at minimal cost. To provide support services to online genealogical activities, such as Usenet newsgroup moderation, mailing list maintenance, surname list generation, and so forth.”

  A quick guided tour of RootsWeb only scratches the surface of all the helpful and informative services available on this site. The following story gives you an idea of the unique possibilities RootsWeb offers.

  Success Story: RootsWeb Leads to a Reunion

  About three years ago, I started searching for my Powell ancestors on my father’s side, but about the only thing I knew how to do was search the surname and message boards. One night, after having done nothing in about two months, I decided to get online and read the [RootsWeb] surname message boards. On a whim, I went into the Hubbard message boards on my mother’s side.

  The first message I read was about someone searching for descendants of my grandmother’s parents. When my grandmother was about three or four, her mother passed away and she went to live with an aunt and uncle. Eventually, my grandmother lost contact with her brothers. She did see her oldest brother once when she was about 15, but after that she never saw or heard from him again. That night, I found him—a person my grandmother had not seen in over 70 years. We flew to Washington state and met all kinds of new cousins, aunts, and uncles. Over the next two years, my grandmother spoke with her brother many times. Unfortunately, he passed away soon after, but she did see him twice and was able to speak with him on numerous occasions.

  We figured out that the message I responded to had been posted for about a minute before I discovered it. The surname message boards are a wonderful tool in searching for the ancestors and relatives you never knew you had, or those you had but didn’t know who they were.

  —Jennifer Powell Lyons

  Digging in RootsWeb

  RootsWeb has more genealogical information than you can shake a stick at. Some of this is secondary source information, such as the genealogy databases (GEDCOMs) members have submitted. Some of this information is close to primary source information, though still derivative—for example, transcripts of wills, deeds, census forms, and vital records, some with citations of where exactly the physical record can be found. Some of it is primary information (for example, Ancestry.com’s census images) and you have to pay a subscription fee to Ancestry.com to access it.

  At the top of all RootsWeb pages, you’ll see a navigation bar with these categories: Home, Searches, Family Trees, Mailing Lists, Message Boards, Web Sites, Passwords, and Help (see Figure 18-4). Home, Passwords, and Help are self-explanatory.

  FIGURE 18-4. All RootsWeb pages have a navigation bar at the top.

  When you look at the RootsWeb home page in your browser, you’ll find two search templates to input a surname, first name, or any keywords. The search will look in all the RootsWeb pages or Ancestry.com databases and show you the results. It’s a great way to get started on your genealogy!

  Finding information on RootsWeb can be that simple. However, you can use many different tools on the site to get more targeted results.

  Getting Started at RootsWeb

  On the Home page index is a section called “Getting Started.” The sections there—Getting Started at RootsWeb, Ancestry Tour, RootsWeb’s Guide To Tracing Family Trees, RootsWeb Review Archives, Subscribe, and What’s New—will give the beginner a good grounding in RootsWeb. Getting Started At RootsWeb is a short page on how to share, communicate, research, and volunteer with the site. Ancestry Tour is a multimedia overview of what the commercial side offers. RootsWeb’s Guide To Tracing Family Trees is really a collection of guides sorted by general genealogy, sources, and countries. What’s New lists the newest additions to the pages and databases on the volunteer side, and subscribing to RootsWeb Review will bring the same information to your e-mail inbox.

  Available Files and Databases

  ROOTS-L has tons of files and databases, which you can get access to by e-mailing the appropriate commands to the list server that runs ROOTS-L. You can search the ROOTS-L library for everything from a fabulous collection devoted to obtaining vital records, to useful tips for beginners, to book lists from the Library of Congress, and more. Some of the available files include:

  • Surname Helper (http://surhelp.rootsweb.com) Looks at the RootsWeb message boards and personal websites.

  • U.S. Town/County Database (http://resources.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/townco.cgi) Looks for locations. It’s a sort of online gazetteer.

  • The WorldConnect Project (http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com) Searches GEDCOMs of family trees submitted by RootsWeb members.

  • The USGenWeb Archives Search (http://usgenweb.org) Looks for pages posted across the United States in the GenWeb Project.

  • WorldGenWeb (http://worldgenweb.org) Searches for genealogy resources in nations outside the United States.

  • RootsWeb Surname List The RootsWeb Surname List (RSL), located at http://rsl.rootsweb.com, is a registry of who is searching for whom and in what times and places. The listings include contact information for each entry. When you find someone looking for the same name, in the same area, and in about the same time period, you might be able to help each other. That’s the intent of the list. You don’t have to pay to submit your own data or to search for data. To search the list, you can use the form on the search page or go to the page directly. On the RSL page, type the surname you want to search for. You can narrow your search by including a location where you think the person you are looking for lives or lived, using the abbreviations you’ll find in the link below the location box. Use the options to choose whether you want to search by surname (names spelled exactly as you’ve typed them) or by Soundex or Metaphone (names that sound like the one you’ve typed but spelled differently). In future attempts, you can limit the search to new submissions within the last week, month, or two months. The list is updated once a month. The Migration field shows you the path the family took. SC>GA, for example, shows migration from South Carolina to Georgia.

  • WorldConnect Project The WorldConnect Project is one of several GEDCOMs discussed in Chapter 11. When searching it from the RootsWeb home page, you can only input first and last names. The results page has another input fo
rm at the bottom, enabling you to fine-tune the search by adding places and dates. If you go to the WorldConnect page at http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com, you can find links to tips and hints for using the site. Remember, all the data here is uploaded by volunteers, so errors might exist!

  • Social Security Death Index The Social Security Death Index (SSDI), located at http://ssdi.rootsweb.com, searches the federal records of deaths. Anyone who died before Social Security began in the 1930s won’t be in this database. When searching from the RootsWeb home page, all you can input is the first and last name, but the results page will let you link to the Advanced Search page, where you can narrow the search by location and date. This is an excellent tool for researching twentieth-century ancestors.

  • GenSeeker GenSeeker looks for your search terms on the thousands of personal genealogy webpages at RootsWeb, plus any other registered documents, such as records transcriptions. You can also perform Boolean searches.

  Other Search Engines

  RootsWeb has several other ways for you to search both the site and the Web at large. Search Thingy looks at all the databases and text files, and MetaSearch looks for names across RootsWeb. The Surnames search index, United States Counties/States index, and the Countries index all search different subsets of RootsWeb information. These searches can be helpful in your research, but they assume you’re a rank beginner with no more than a name or a place to launch your inquiries. Perhaps you know for sure that you’re looking for a land record in Alabama or a cemetery in Iowa. RootsWeb has several searchable resources for items such as these. All these are worth looking at, and all can be accessed from http://searches.rootsweb.ancestry.com/.

  Message Boards and Mailing Lists

  Among the best resources on RootsWeb are the mailing lists and message boards, now hosted on Ancestry.com. A message board is a place where messages are read, sent, and answered on the Web, using a browser. A mailing list is where messages are e-mailed to and from the members. A mail client is used to read them.

  Click the bottom of any message board’s page to read the frequently asked questions (FAQs), request a new board, read the rules, or get help. The mailing lists, located at http://lists.rootsweb.com, cover many topics, such as the RootsWeb newsletters, described later in this chapter. Lists exist for specific surnames; every state in the United States; other countries (from Aruba to Zimbabwe); and topics such as adoption, medical genealogy, prisons, and heraldry. From the Mailing Lists page, you can click a link to each one, and you’ll get instructions on how to use the list, including subscribing, unsubscribing, sticking to the topic, and so on.

  Besides ROOTS-L, which is the grandparent of genealogy mailing lists on the Internet, RootsWeb hosts literally thousands of mailing lists. The index, located at www.rootsweb.com/~maillist, has thousands of lists you can join, along with instructions explaining how to subscribe.

  A good rule of thumb: Be choosy in joining lists! Take on only a few at a time. Read the lists for a while, sign off if they don’t prove useful, and then try some others. Some lists are extremely active—sometimes overwhelmingly so. One RootsWeb user who signed up for every possible mailing list for the United Kingdom had 9,000 e-mails in his inbox within 24 hours! Be careful what you wish for…

  And remember, some lists are archived, so you needn’t subscribe to see if that list is talking about subjects of interest to you. Just search the archive for your keywords, and save the important messages. You might even want to start a mailing list of your own someday, which contributors can do. You can learn more about what’s required of a list owner by going to the Help page and clicking the Request A Mailing List link or by going to http://resources.rootsweb.com/adopt.

  Newsletters

  A newsletter, like a mailing list, comes straight to your e-mail inbox. Unlike the lists discussed previously, however, they are not for discussion; the communication is one-to-many. Like a print magazine, a newsletter will have news, notes, stories, and the occasional (text) advertisement. RootsWeb has several e-mail newsletters, all of which are worth reading. Here are some descriptions of them.

  RootsWeb-Sponsored Pages

  Books We Own (http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bwo) is a list of resources owned and accessed by volunteers who are willing to look up genealogical information and then e-mail or snail mail it to others who request it. It works like a worldwide research library, where your shelf of genealogy books is one branch and you’re one librarian of thousands. This is a volunteer service, and participants might ask for reimbursement of copies and postage if information is provided via snail mail. The project began in 1996 as a way for members of the ROOTS-L mailing list to share their resources with one another, and now some 1,500 people are involved.

  FreeBMD (http://freebmd.org.uk) stands for Free Births, Marriages, and Deaths. The FreeBMD Project’s objective is to provide free Internet access to the Civil Registration index information for England and Wales. The Civil Registration system for recording births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales has been in place since 1837. This is one of the most significant single resources for genealogical research back to Victorian times.

  Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (http://immigrantships.net) is a group of volunteers dedicated to making the search for our ancestors’ immigration easier. The aim is to make as many ships’ passenger lists as possible available online—and not just for U.S. ports. There are databases for Australia, Canada, Irish passengers to Argentina, and more. This group would also be happy to have your help!

  State Resource Pages (http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/roots-l/usa.html) is one of the main areas of RootsWeb. It offers a wealth of information to those researching in the United States.

  Freepages are genealogy pages by volunteers. These pages must fit the RootsWeb mission; cannot contain copyrighted, commercial, or multimedia material; and cannot redirect to another site. If you meet these and all the other rules stated on http://accounts.rootsweb.ancestry.com, you can have free web space at RootsWeb. The freepages include sites of major RootsWeb projects, such as USGenWeb and WorldGenWeb, as well as genealogical or historical organizations.

  You can find kids’ pages, lessons and help pages, memorials, and timelines among these pages. If you already have a genealogy-related website and want it linked from RootsWeb, you can register it as well.

  The Help Desk

  The Help Desk (http://helpdesk.rootsweb.com/) maintains a page to help you find a FAQ file about RootsWeb and its services. If you have a question or problem, check here first. If you can’t find an answer here, you can follow the links from this site to the message board, where you can post a question for the Help Desk team to answer.

  This quick tour is just enough to whet your appetite, but isn’t even half of what’s there. Spend some time getting to know RootsWeb.

  Wrapping Up

  • Ancestry.com and RootsWeb have digitized, transcribed, and abstracted records for you to search, as well as message boards and other interactive services.

  • Many Ancestry.com articles and helpful files are free, but the bulk of the data is only available to paying members.

  • RootsWeb is the oldest gathering of volunteer pages, data, and programs in the world of online genealogy.

  Chapter 19

  Genealogical Publishing Houses and Their Sites

  You will definitely want to read some books on genealogy as you pursue your family history (like this one!). And someday, you may even want to publish your own book on your family history or on the expertise you have gained in the process.

  Publishing a Genealogy Book

  There are several ways to go about publishing a book. For a long time, your usual route to publishing a genealogy was to pay a book publisher anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 to typeset, print, and bind your books. Sometimes, you could find a short-run publisher, that is, a publisher who specialized in printing 1,000 or fewer copies of an old, out-of-print, and out-of-copyright book that someone wanted revived for libraries and
archives. Again, this involved paying thousands of dollars up front.

  Note

  If you only want enough copies of your genealogy for your immediate family, consider using a genealogy program—for example, RootsMagic, The Master Genealogist, Heredis, and so on—that can output your data as a narrative. It will not be very professional in appearance, but it will certainly be cheaper. This will entail much more effort on your part to create a nice “master copy” (indeed, physically cutting and pasting may not be out of the question), but the result can be run off at your local office supply store. Binding can be as simple as having the store drill holes and then buying enough three-ring binders to hold your copies.

  If your topic is more about how to do genealogy than the family history of one surname, sometimes, a book publishing house will accept a genealogy methods book, pay an advance, foot the cost of the production, and pay royalties on the proceeds to an author just as is the practice for novels and textbooks.