Making your research easier using genealogical websites

Whew! I don't know about all of you, but when the day after New Year's comes, I'm ready for a break. So much for reflecting on the past year and making resolutions for the next....I just want all the left overs in my fridge gone, the Christmas decorations put away and clean sheets on all the spare beds so I can shut those bedroom doors and forget about them for another 10 months! Heaven forbid I am going to open a drawer in the fridge in May and find leftover turkey in it....that's my resolution: Empty out, throw out!

If only I could be that brutal with my genealogical research! I guess I keep thinking that the research I did on someone who turned out not to be related might be valuable someday...I don't know who to, but then I'll probably be gone then anyway. Nothing like leaving a mystery or two for your kids to ponder over!

Research becomes easier every year with the addition of websites and information to the internet. For the last few meetings our members have been listing websites that are both free and worth the effort to use.

Of course my all-time favorite for tracing old newspaper articles up to about 1922 is Chronicling America: www.chroniclingamerica.gov. What I don't mention very often is the myriad of information other than newspapers that is available on this Library of Congress website. You can research maps, periodicals, pictures, personal journals and this website even has a collection of websites! You can access all of this with the above listed site or just go to: www.loc.gov for the main menu.

Another one of my favorites is the Bureau of Land Management: www.glorecords.blm.gov/ . Tree claims, Homestead Act claims, mining, etc., can be found here. It is not the easiest website to navigate but just keep plugging along, you'll get where you want!

Free specific genealogy information can be accessed at: www.usgenweb.org . This site has been in existence for 20 years. While not all information is available on this site, when doing research every little bit of free information you can get is precious.

Another site I like to use is: www.familysearch.org. This site, provided by the LDS Church, is completely free and completely safe in as much as they are not going to sell you anything or attach you to websites that do. One of the more interesting bits of information they provide, besides all of the hands on research they have done throughout the world, is a collection of family trees provided by other people to the site. Make sure you go ahead and "join" the site and establish a user name and password so that you get the full benefit of the information available.

Here are a few more to take a look at! I haven't tried these yet so can't affirm their usefulness. Looking for funeral home information: www.funeralnet.com/funeral-home-search.html. Have relatives that owned land in Illinois: http://landplats.ilsos.net/FTP_Illinois.html. Want to do census research: www.myfreecensus.com/us-census.htm. Interested in war history and monuments: www.abmc.gov which is the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Southwest Nebraska Genealogy Society's next meeting will be Saturday Jan. 7 at 1:30 p.m. 110 West C, Suite M-3. Our library will be open at that time also and the public is always welcome!