Tuesday, May 5, 2009

100 Genealogy Resources to Discover Your Ancestry

Several genealogy bloggers thought that the article 100 Genealogy Resources to Discover Your Ancestry by Suzane Smith on the Phlebotomy Technician Schools web site was really great, and was a keeper to be passed to novice and experienced genealogists for reference purposes. The stated purpose of the list was to:

"Research and discover your ancestry with these 100 tools to get you started building a family tree. Trace back as far as you can find and share your results with friends and family. Many of the forums in this list will also garner you a few new friends in the genealogy spectrum. Tracing your roots will give you insight into your family’s past and give you an edge in your own forensic education endeavors."

Usually when there is a list of 100 items, they are either put in some order of most important to less important, or are grouped together (such as databases, family trees, DNA sites, archives, etc.). This list does neither.

An unsuspecting genealogist might start with #1 on the list - Genetree: You belong here. The next two on the list are Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation and mitosearch, both DNA related sites. But where is the biggest DNA site, www.FamilyTreeDNA.com, or the www.Ysearch.com site (the Y-DNA site comparable to the mitochondrial DNA site)?

The genealogy database providers on the list are #8 FamilySearch, #9 Ancestry.com, #10 DistantCousin.com, #14 HeritageQuestOnline, #17 GenealogyBank, #18 Footonte.com, #22 WorldVitalRecords.com and more.

While this list has some of the most useful genealogy web sites on it, I think that a better list is on Family Tree Magazine's 101 Best Web Sites. There may be a new list out soon - we'll see!

I guess I'll go compile the Top 10 lists that my readers wrote about over the weekend. Let's see how they compare!

2 comments:

M. Diane Rogers said...

Well... this list is very USA-centric too - not everyone is doing US genealogy research, even in the US. But, who is Suzanne Smith? I long to know as at this same website (and it is an odd place for genealogy, you must admit) there is another very interesting list 'Women in Science - 50 Great Blogs'.

John said...

If you have a new website you want many people to link to you create several top 10, top 20, top 100 lists. They don't have to be related to your site's theme at all, as long as you can get people to link to them and discuss them, it will increase the ranking of your site on Google.

At least, that's my best guess behind the reason for this list, the "Women in Science - 50 great blogs" list, and the "Top 20 iPhone Apps for Overwhelmed Students" list. Otherwise, it makes no sense why these lists would be on a search engine for Phlebotomy Technician Schools.