Thursday, July 10, 2008

Family Tree Magazines 101 Best Web Sites for 2008

The September 2008 issue of Family Tree Magazine came this week, and I've enjoyed reading their list of the 101 Best Web Sites for 2008. You can see all of their list here.

The "usual suspects" are all here. There were several surprises to me, including:

* Distant Cousin - A new site for me. There are records from over 1,500 sources, including links to searches on commercial sites.

* Newspaper Abstracts - A new site for me. These are abstracts from newspapers provided by volunteers. There are over 55,000 "pages" - just a drop in the barrel, but worth checking from time to time.

* Archives of Maryland Online -- A new site for me. There are more than 471,000 historical documents here. I need to explore this for Linda's McKnew, Prather, Pickrell and other surnames.

* Western States Historical Marriage Records Index - a new site for me. There are over 600,000 marriage records indexed here. I found 24 "Seaver" matches - most of them are not in my Seaver database.

* YSearch and MitoSearch -- In the DNA section, I was surprised that they didn't include www.FamilyTreeDNA.com in the 101 best, but these two sites are part of FamilyTreeDNA. The YSearch link in the magazine and on the web site is wrong - it should be www.ysearch.org.

What would I have included?

* Joe Beine's index web pages -- Death Indexes, Birth and Marriage Indexes, Passenger List Indexes, Naturalization Indexes, Military Indexes, etc. They are all listed on one entry page at http://www.deathindexes.com/sites.html. These sites are extremely useful to me.

* The Pro Genealogists Genealogy sleuth pages at http://www.progenealogists.com/genealogysleuthb.htm. I find this one of the best genealogy data portal and genealogy education site on the web.

* The most useful genealogy tutorial for genealogists trying to learn how to use database web sites is the Learn Web Skills site at http://www.learnwebskills.com/family/intro.html.

There are many more very useful web sites, and I know that the magazine cannot list all of them. It would be interesting to know the criteria they used to choose the 101 sites that they did. Maybe they should increase the number!

What web sites would you add to their list?

1 comment:

Joe said...

Thanks for mentioning my websites, Randy. Yesterday I was working on an Alabama genealogy project and the first place I went was the Alabama webpage of www.deathindexes.com

I find it pretty useful myself :)