Reciprocal Links?
The links on this page are to resources I use myself -- some daily, some less often. They are not "reciprocal links" placed here as a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" ploy to gain more web traffic. That said, if you have a link to a useful genealogy-related resource, I'd love to have a look. If I like what I see, I'll list the site here. Simply e-mail with an URL and a brief description of the site.
Books and Magazines
Amazon.com
I shop for books, dvds and commercial computer software almost exclusively at Amazon.com. I often find the best prices on electronics and computer equipment at Amazon too. If I see a book or software I'd like for sale elsewhere, I head to Amazon to compare prices. You can even get used and out-of-print books through Amazon.
Ancestry Magazine
I have subscribed to Ancestry Magazine since 1999 and I highly recommend it. It's a beautifully prepared magazine with excellent articles. There are articles on using Ancestry.com services, but I don't feel it is heavily weighted in that direction.
Family Chronicle Magazine
Family Chronicle is a how-to magazine which covers a myriad of topics related to family history research. I've subscribed for several years and I've always found something interesting and new in every issue.
Internet Genealogy Magazine
Internet Genealogy is a sister magazine to Family Chronicle. It is a new magazine and I was a "charter subscriber". As the title says, Internet Genealogy is a dedicated to family history research on the internet.
Family History and Personal Genealogy Web Sites
The Fitzpatrick Family of New Orleans, Louisiana
The Fitzpatrick Family site was the immediate impetus of my journey into my own genealogy and family history. The site was built by my uncle, Mike Fitzpatrick (my father's half-brother) and after my Dad showed it to me I wanted to have a site about OUR family.
Acadian Genealogy
The Acadian Genealogy home page bills itself as the oldest and most complete source on the internet of Acadian-Cajun & French-Canadian family resources, surnames and historical information.
Dumont-Dumond Genealogy
The Dumont-Dumond Genealogy Home Page is an excellent starting point for Dumond researchers on the internet. The page includes a brief introduction into four separate Dumont immigrant ancestors with links to in-depth family trees online for all four.
Clan Boyd Society International
The Boyd Genealogy research center is dedicated to help families find their roots. It's updated daily with new Boyd information.
Clan Gregor
The Clan Gregor home page provides information about the history and heritage of the MacGregor clan including some genealogical resources. The Greer surname is a sept of the MacGregor clan.
Official Clan Donnachaidh Web Site
Clan Donnachaidh includes the surname Reid as one of its most prominent septs. The Clan Donnachaidh web site includes information on the history of the clan.
Genealogy and Family History Portals and Databases
Ancestry.com
Ancestry.com has recently completed digitizing and indexing all of the publicly available United States decennial censuses from 1790-1930 and that's just the beginning of the raw data and information available on Ancestry. I've been an Ancestry subscriber for over six years. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in doing genealogical research on the internet. Subscribing to Ancestry isn't cheap, but you can search for free and then decide if you want to pay for a subscription. Many libraries have Ancestry subscriptions that you can use either in the library or by logging into the library's web site from your home -- so be sure to check with your local library.
RootsWeb
RootsWeb is the oldest and largest free genealogy site on the web. It is also owned by Ancestry.com and you'll find Ancestry ads everywhere, but there's plenty of content available on RootsWeb including free web sites, major genealogy projects, mailing lists and discussion forums.
USGenWeb
The USGenWeb Project is an all-volunteer effort to provide free genealogy information for every US state and county. Data and information available on each county and state web site varies widely, but be sure to check out the states and counties you research.
Cyndi's List
Cyndi's List is undoubtedly the LARGEST list of of genealogical links on the web. As of today there are over 258,300 sites in over 180 categories and another 8,500 not yet categorized. Cyndi's List is a great way to kill an afternoon surfing the web. That said, there is really no way, no WAIT! Cyndi's added a Google search to her site! Well, it's better than nothing, but clicking on a search result will only get you to the right page and Cyndi's pages are HUGE. I'd suggest following up the Google search with a "find on this page" using your browser. Another down side to Cyndi's List is broken links. I recently spent an afternoon just browsing a category and reporting all the broken links I found.
FamilySearch
FamilySearch is a great family history search site developed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. FamilySearch has billions of free family tree, family history, ancestry, genealogy and census records. I started my own genealogy at FamilySearch not long after it went online in 1999. The fire kindled by my uncle's Fitzpatrick Family of New Orleans web site was fueled by finding real clues to my own family history at FamilySearch. Oh, and did I mention it's free?
Maps and Gazetteers
Google Maps
Google Maps is a really cool tool! You can find street maps, satellite photos and hybrid map-satellite views for the world. You can also get driving directions!
Topozone
Topozone is a commercial topographical map service, but you can see many maps for free. Topozone has every USGS topographic map, orthophotomap, and aerial photograph in the entire United States. Just type a place name in the search box and go!
The National Map
The National Map is a service of the United States Geological Survey. It is an interactive map service for the United States and is fun to play with. You can print or download your maps.
Geographic Names Information System
The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a database of over two million physical and cultural geographic names in the United States. Using GNIS you can find towns, cemeteries, churches, schools, etc... Information provided will include the county and the USGS map each geographic feature is in or on. I use GNIS a lot for confirming county names for geographic locations. A neat feature of GNIS is that you can click on a location name to get details and then can choose from several mapping sites to be taken directly to a map of the location (including Google Maps, Topozone and Terraserver USA.
Old Maps - UK
Old Maps - UK provides access to Britain's most extensive digital archive of historical maps.
Search Engines
Google is the search engine with the name that has become a verb: to Google is everywhere. Google is my favorite search engine. In fact, I rarely turn to any other search engine, because I can almost always find what I'm looking for on Google. I use Google everyday, both at work and at home. I easily find everything from football tickets to technical error message being spit out by my computers. For genealogical searches you can either start from scratch or use the free helper tool described next.
Free Genealogy Search Help for Google
The genealogy search help for Google site helps you format your genealogy searches using input forms, takes the data from the form and creates Google queries from the data. This not only gets you started googling, but shows you the resulting query so you can form your own queries in the future.
Software
The Master Genealogist
The Master Genealogist (TMG) is gold standard of genealogy software, in my opinion. I've looked at and tried just about all of the software out there and none comes close to TMG. If you're a novice researcher you can start out simple and progress to the more advanced features of TMG.
Second Site
Second Site is software to build family tree web sites from your The Master Genealogist database. I use it to create the family trees on this An American Family. There are dozens of theme and format combinations and literally hundreds of customization options. For my own trees I created the pages with Second Site and then wrapped them in my site template and style sheet by hand for a look that not only matches my site exactly, but is unique among Second Site users.
dzSoft WebPad
WebPad is a great little HTML editor with color syntax-checking for HTML, ASP and PHP, a nice preview browser and built-in
pdf995
pdf995 is a Microsoft Windows printer driver which allows you to print any document to an Adobe portable document format (.pdf) file viewable in Adobe Acrobat Reader. It's small, quick and versatile and it's free to try, $9.95 to buy.
Adobe PhotoShop Elements
is an easy-to-use, but extremely powerful, photo organization and editing application. Photoshop Elements incorporates a sub-set of the functionality of it's more powerful, and much more expensive, sibling, Photoshop as well as the photo organizing tools of it's LESS expensive sibling, Photoshop Album. I use it for all my image editing work although I use IrfanView (below) for quick viewing, file format conversions and printing when I just need to work on one graphic file.
IrfanView
IrfanView is a FREEWARE graphic viewer. It supports just about any graphics file format you can think of and is great for quick file viewing, format conversion and printing. It is free for non-commercial use (that means "at home").