Thursday, January 25, 2007

Check out GenealogyToday databases

There are commercial sites, such as Ancestry.com, which have many of the major databases that can be used to find information about our ancestors. Typically, these sites include census, military, immigration, newspaper, vital and other records.

The web site http://genealogytoday.com/ specializes in some of the more obscure databases - and they may contain the fact that you need to unlock your brick wall problem. A summary of what's available on the site is at http://www.genealogytoday.com/info/site-intro.html.

The main databases include:

* The Family Connection (subscribe to see data)
* Military Roots Project
* Acadian - Cajun Research (subscribe to see data)
* Missing Persons Registry
* First Name Basis
* New England Early Genealogy (subscribe to see data)
* GenWeekly newsletter archive (subscribe to see content)
* several others

The Special Collection databases include:

* Funeral Cards (20,900 names)
* Railroad Employees (subscribe to see data)
* World War 2 Ration Books (2,500 names)
* Criminal Records (subscribe to see data)
* Business Cards (950 names)

You can search the index for all databases for free. However, you must register to see results from the free databases, and subscribe to see the not-free databases. It appears that each subscription database is priced separately.

There is also an Online Guide to Genealogy that contains a wealth of good information in the categories of Getting Started, Family History, Research Tools and Advanced Topics. There are four regular monthly columnists. There are also two genealogy blogs - http://www.genweekly.com/ and http://www.saveourgenealogy.com/.

Illya D'Addezio has built a very nice site with unique resources. I advise that you take a look at it - enter your "problem children" into the search engine and see if it's a site that can help you.

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