Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Tuesday's Tip - Read the USGenWeb.org and WorldGenWeb.org sites

This week's Tuesday's Tip is to use State and County http://www.usgenweb.org/ sites, and the http://www.worldgenweb.org/ sites in order to find out more about specific localities and the resources in those localities.

On the http://www.usgenweb.org/ site, there are links to each State's site.  Within each State site, there are links to a site for each County.  For instance, the State of California site is http://cagenweb.com/ and the Calaveras County site is http://cagenweb.com/lr/calaveras/.  On this County site, there are links to user-contributed (volunteer) information about the county history, queries, the historical society, a historical newspaper, county post offices, county government, county archives, county recorder, county cemeteries, and much more.

That's just one example, picked pretty much randomly.  Many of the County websites are very extensive, and a few are fairly sparse - the volunteers determine the content on these web sites.

The USGenWeb Project also has projects - the list can be found at http://usgenweb.org/projects/index.shtml.  The USGenWeb Archives are at http://usgwarchives.net/ and a user can search all of the Archives on all of the State and county web pages using the search fields at http://usgwarchives.net/search/searcharchives.html.

When I want to know something about a specific county, the USGenWeb Project is the first website that I visit.  This may change in coming years, the FamilySearch Research Wiki and the Ancestry.com Family History Wiki will probably have definitive information about each state and county, including links to repository and online resources.

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