VirtualGenealogy.info

Our new website, Virtual Genealogy, is now up and running! We are collecting as many links as we can find to sites on the web that contain digitized records: vital (birth, marriage, death), census and city directory. We need your help to find more! Please contribute links or report broken ones as you tour the site. We welcome your submissions and suggestions.

The first link we've posted is one for the 1930 US Census. Many more will follow!

Conducting an Interview

Before you begin a virtual genealogy search, you may want to make sure you have already collected the data that is already available offline. One of the most important parts of creating a family history is preserving the stories of relatives. Often, there will never be a way to retrieve these unique experiences and overlap with real history unless YOU actually are the person who records the information. Remember Aunt Martha? You see her every year at Thanksgiving Dinner - and you've heard her tell the story about Great-Great-Grandpa and the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. But did you (or anyone) ever get a video camera and sit down with her to record her memories? You might be surprised, but if you wait just a little longer, Aunt Martha and ALL of her memories will be gone forever. You can't retrieve that from an online database! People who are living today remember things that others haven't seen or heard. I highly recommend you take the time to (at least) jot down some of the things you've already heard - and think of some questions to ask the next time you are together as a family. Don't be shy: Aunt Martha will fuss about "why do you want to know this?" and "I can't remember something that long ago." Be patient and assure her that you want the younger generation to remember all the things that the family experienced. There is no better way to discover how lucky we are today than to hear a story about life in the Dust Bowl or fragments of the tale of an Italian family's harrowing ocean crossing in the dead of winter. One more piece of advice: don't dismiss the improbable yarn about connection to some major event or person. If there is one thing I've learned, it is that our older relatives (without multi-media distraction) listened a lot more than we do and probably forgot more than we have ever known about our family. Lastly, make copies of your video or type up your notes in an email. They may not care about it now but someday, the rest of the family will start asking if anyone remembers... Happy hunting!

Welcome!

The purpose of this blog is to help people who are seeking their family history on the internet. As someone with nearly 20 years of experience with using the web to track down genealogy information, I wanted to share the lessons I've learned. One of the most important is this: using the internet to locate family roots will never be as effective as interviewing relatives, visiting the Special Collections Room at a local library or wading through the tall grass of an old farm cemetery. I've done these things, too - and they have made the "hobby" (or, as I've seen it, "life-long passion") truly meaningful. Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of good things about using the internet. For one thing, you don't need to have the money to travel to far-away family locations. You can also browse the web at 3:00 AM... I've often seen the internet "jump-start" a stalled quest for information. Sometimes, it provides a small piece of the puzzle - just when things seemed hopeless. So, I'll dedicate this project to making it easier for you to find online genealogy resources. Very soon, I'll start up a companion site with a collection of useful links to online genealogy research. If something on our site is useful to you during your family history search, please let us know (you can like us or join our group on Facebook!). Happy hunting!