Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Linda's Top 10 Free U.S. Websites

One of the very best society newsletters is COMPU.GEN, published quarterly by the Computer Genealogy Society of San Diego (CGSSD), edited by Joan Lowrey.

Each issue has a column called "Lindy's Links" written by Linda Karcz. In her column, she provides a number of links to new and/or useful genealogy web sites. In the June 2007 issue, she has an article titled "Top 10 Free U.S. Websites." The article describes the features of each web site.

I hope it is "fair use" to just list Lindy's Top 10 below:

1. LDS Family Search - http://www.familysearch.org/
2. USGenWeb - http://www.usgenweb.org/
3. Linkpendium - http://www.linkpendium.com/
4. Rootsweb - http://www.rootsweb.com/
5. Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Systems - http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/
6. GLO Land Patent Records - http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/
7. GenForum - http://www.genforum.com/
8. Heritage Quest Online (through subscribing libraries)
9. One-Step Webpages by Stephen P. Morse - http://stevemorse.org/
10. Census Online - http://www.census-online.com/links

Do you agree with Linda's Top 10 Free Sites? What would you add or subtract from it?

COMPU.GEN has several more great articles in its 24 pages - I recommend being a member of this fine organization. I am!

3 comments:

Miriam Robbins said...

Find A Grave is definitely on my own Top Ten list, as well as Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, Olive Tree Genealogy, and the National Archives.

Debbye said...

I can think of two that should be added into the top 10 free websites....BYU [Brigham Young University], and Google Books.

Anonymous said...

I think we'd all agree that it's just too hard to pick 10. The top 10 change depending upon the who, when, and where of your ancestors.

That said, I must vote for one of the free sites that is just as popular today as it was in 2001 when it was among the first to offer FREE online images (before many of us had high-speed internet access) and an electronic index of 25 million records connecting the names to those historic images.

Have you guessed it yet? I'm referring, of course, to the EllisIsland.org web site. The free site hosted by The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation based in NYC. With 40% of Americans connecting to at least one passenger on these lists, it's hard to not see this in ANY top 10 (but, I guess I can understand that from a West coast list to some degree).

Great list, nonetheless.
Dan Lynch
Trumbull CT