There are three main sources of family history information on the internet: the world wide web, newsgroups, and mailing lists. Although these have different origins and characteristics, they are accessible through the main operating systems that come with computers and you don’t have to know the technical differences to make full use of them.
World wide web websites (with a www address) are for access only through a ‘browser’, although once into the site you can usually send an email through a ‘contact us’ link. You can also move by ‘hyperlinks’ (nerds skip all this ABC stuff) to related websites ad infinitum.
Most of the internet source information in this book relates to websites (the world wide web), which is where the vast majority of helpful material resides, and where you can do name searches. Having said that, you can find on websites all you need to know about other ways to use the internet as a resource for genealogy, such as through mailing lists and newsgroups, which we will briefly describe in this chapter.
Mailing Lists
Mailing lists are discussion forums where people who are interested in a subject can communicate, request and share
information, sources, and techniques. There are as many covering family history as on just about any other topic. They operate much like your own email address list to which you can circulate a message to many other email addresses at once. The difference with a mailing list is that everybody gets everybody else’s (subscribers’) postings, and the list may run to many thousands.
‘Replies’, likewise, are posted to the entire list. Usually the volume of daily messages is such that for practical purposes you will select to receive a daily or weekly abstract, from which you can access individual messages as you wish. You can, of course, make email contact with people individually rather than via the list once you establish common interests.
Like mailing lists about other popular interests, there are a great many covering the subject of genealogy, including specific surnames. So an early task is to check whether there is one or more mailing list for the name you want to research.
From GENUKI and other general FH sites you will find a link to ROOTS-L from rootsweb, which is in effect an electronic mailing list community covering family research and the broader aspects of genealogical research. There are thousands of subscribers, giving you instant access to an enormous resource, including professionals who may frequent the lists.
The sites give all the information you need about the specific purposes of each list and any rules to follow, how to subscribe, unsubscribe and so on. Some lists are aimed at novices (‘newbies’) and these may be of help for a while, but you will be surprised at how soon you become an old hand.
Perusing daily emails, and even just digesting the digests, can take a lot of time. You will therefore need to be choosy
as to which ones you subscribe to, and do a regular ‘unsubscribe’ clean out as soon as you realise you are not getting benefit from a list. Having said that, mailing lists (and websites) rise and fall like empires so it may pay to slip in and out of them to see what they are up to.
Further into your research, more specialised lists will come into their own as you develop particular interests. For example, lists that specialise in different occupations, localities (like FHS lists), specific research guidance such as pitfalls and dead ends, inter-racial ancestry, shipwrecks and persons at sea, and many, many more. Unlike websites, you can post specific queries to a mailing list and draw on the experience of hundreds or thousands of people with similar family history interests.
If you wish you can go straight to a catalogue of LISTSERV lists at www.lsoft.com . Also, the site at www.rootsweb includes ‘General Resources on the Internet’ and this includes mailing lists, including genealogy-related societies’ mailing lists. The rootsweb surname listing includes the strangest names, so there is a good chance you will find yours.