Genealogy is not a pastime for the faint of heart. If you trace your family tree back just 300 years, or 16 generations, you will have a list of more than 8,000 people. Alamo PC has a genealogy SIG that meets the first Wednesday of every month at USAA Towers. If you're new to the field, this is an excellent starting point. To find out more about the SIG, contact Bob Battaglia, (210) 651-5642. 

 Before you go online you need to understand some genealogy computer jargon: 

• GEDCOM: Stands for GEnealogy Data COMmunications. It is a standardized format for genealogy databases that allows the exchange of data among different software programs and even among different operating systems. If you are investing in genealogy software, make sure it can both read and write GEDCOM files.

 

 
 
 

• Tiny Tafel: Tafel is German for table, and a tiny tafel is a compressed version of an ahnentafel, or ancestor chart. It is a way of condensing information so it can quickly be transmitted via modem, compactly stored to disk and rapidly scanned. Some genealogy programs can generate tiny tafels and there are also shareware utilities that can create them for you.

 

 
 
 

• Soundex: This is a method of reducing surnames to an alpha-numeric code so that names that are spelled differently but sound alike can be cross-referenced. The system was developed by the Works Project Administration during the 1930s, and much of the US census data is indexed by Soundex. There are shareware programs that will generate Soundex codes but you can also get yours right off of the 'Net by pointing to http://www.rand.org/. My maiden name, Konschak, codes out as K522. 

 Although there is a wealth of how-to information on the Internet, beginners to genealogy or to online communications might want to invest in a book. We bought Your Roots by Richard Eastman (Ziff-Davis Press, Emeryville, CA: 1995, ISBN: 1-56276-326-1, $24.95) It includes a CD-ROM of genealogy shareware, plus a description of the services available on America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve, BBSs and the Internet. It was a well written, well organized beginning-level text. Another one we spotted in the book stores is Genealogy Online, by Elizabeth Powell Crouse (Windcrest/McGraw Hill, 1995, ISBN 0-07-014749-3.) This book contains a computer disk stuffed with shareware, forms and contacts as well as information similar to the one we bought. There are also places to buy genealogy books online. The Association of Genealogy Lending Libraries, for example, has an online catalog and order form; reach them at http://www.xmission.com/~agll/index.html

 Expectations about the information available on the Internet run high. Too high. Many of the official records that are the bread-and-butter of genealogical research -- birth, death, marriage and census records -- have not yet been digitized. The world's biggest genealogy computer database, maintained by the Church of the Latter Day Saints, is only available on CD ROM, although the Mormons are considering getting it online in the next few years. 

Some powerful databases are available on the Internet, but they are managed by commercial firms and require a paid subscription to access them. The real strength of the Internet is in person-to-person communication. If my family tree intersects with yours, and we're both on the Internet, we can find each other and swap information.. If I'm in San Antonio and my family came from Philadelphia, I might be able to find a friend in Pennsylvania to trot down to the county court house and look up a few records for me. 

 You tap into this interpersonal network through Internet mailing lists and newsgroups. There are at least 100 genealogy mailing lists available via e-mail. Lists can be hard to find, but a comprehensive catalogue is available in Genealogy Resources on the Internet compiled by Chris Gaunt and John Fuller. The first 13 pages of this 79 page document contains a list of lists. You can get a copy at ftp://ftp.cac.psu.edu/pub/genealogy/text/guides/gresinet.txt. Another excellent source of lists is a Web site called Genealogy Listservers, Newsgroups and Special Homepages, at http://www.eskimo.com/~chance. You can subscribe to a list by clicking on its name and calling up your Web browser's e-mail form. 

 Lists can be very specific. Some are for individual families, some are regional (the TEXAHOMA list covers Texas) and some are for countries or ethnic groups. A few, including the ESQUINA Spanish/Portuguese list, are in languages other than English. I confess to subscribing to one genealogy list, GER-RUS, which is about Germans who moved to Russia in the last century. The other subscribers are outrageously helpful. One Canadian has access to microfilmed church records, and will look things up for you. People have helped with translations, and have dipped into their extensive home libraries to explain historical puzzles (Did the Czar draft ethnic Germans? Did the Cossacks rampage through the Volga?) 

 Newsgroups are similar to mailing lists. You access these through a news reader program such as Free Agent. One of the most useful is soc. genealogy.surnames, which consists only of surname queries and tiny tafels. It gets hundreds of postings every day, but you can scan through them quickly using your news reader's find button to lope through the subject lines. Before plunging into newsgroups, read the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and learn the format you must use to post inquiries. The Genealogy Resource Guide has a list of newsgroups, as does the list at eskimo.com, or you can use the search function of your mail reader to search all newsgroups for the text string genealogy. 

 Unfortunately, many of the good gophers are languishing in favor of flashier Web pages. There are still a few out there; I recommend theChicano/Latino Gopher, at gopher://latino.sscnet.ucla.edu/. Follow the directory tree through Research Center, then Arts & Humanities and finally into Genealogy. Look through the Genealogy Resource Guide for telnet sites, too. Telnet is a good source for thumbing through library card catalogs. 

 FTP sites are great for getting software and patches. You can search for genealogy in any of the big software sites and come up with a ton of it. I found the most genealogy software at the SimTel Coast-to-Coast Archive, at http://www.coast.net/SimTel/msdos/genealgy.html. 

You'll find even more if you go to the FTP sites of the major genealogy resources on the 'Net. Try ftp://ftp.cac.psu.edu at Penn State, where you can download genealogy shareware programs, utilities that work with commercial software programs (their archives for PAF, the Personal Ancestral File program, are especially comprehensive) , text guides to genealogical research and lists of genealogy societies, historical societies and vital records offices worldwide. It also carries samples of information requests in other languages (how do you ask for birth records from a rathaus in Germany? Find out here.) Another good genealogy FTP site is at ftp://genealogy.emcee.com. The World Wide Web's genealogy resources are like the Texas Folk Life Festival without the chicken dancers and sausage-on-a-stick. You can hop from Idaho to Italy in the course of a few minutes. A good starting place is The Genealogy Home Page at Penn State University, http://thedon.cac.psu.edu/~saw/genealogy.html. This is a comprehensive site, lovingly maintained. Another good jump station is the Genealogy Toolbox, at http://aries.uihr.uiuc.edu/helm/overview.html. Put these two sites into your bookmark file and you will be able to find almost any genealogy site on the Web. 

 Everton is the world's largest publisher of genealogy stuff and their home page, athttp://www.everton.com is outstanding. They publish a free bi-weekly online edition of their magazine, Everton's Genealogical Helper, which contains scads of up-to-the-minute tips and reviews of Internet resources. The old editions are archived, and reading them is a great education. Everton also maintains several searchable databases that require a paid subscription. You can get a one month trial subscription for $15 or they'll give you one free if you submit a GEDCOM to them. For those without Internet access, they also run a BBS (call 1-800 443-6325 for details.) 

There are many searchable databases on the Internet. GenWeb, at http://sillyg.doit.com/genweb/ contains a four page tightly-packed index of all of them. This isn't an all-in-one search -- you have to probe each database to find the surnames you want -- but it's handy to have them listed in one place. The sites are listed by the last name of the person maintaining it, and you are warned that the Doyle database, for example, with more than 11,000 entries, actually contains very few Doyles. This site will also point you to databases of European Royalty and Mayflower descendants (my family isn't on either list, which doesn't surprise me in the least.) 

The Genealogical Server contains more than two million names, 100,000 different surnames and more than 1,500 GEDCOM databases . Your ticket into this resource is submitting a GEDCOM of your own. The site operates via e-mail; you can get the documentation for the process by sending a message to genserv-doc@progcons.com. You request data via message and a full report is returned to you promptly. This site also has a myriad of links to other genealogy sites. Reach it on the Web by pointing to http://soback.kornet.nm.kr/~cmanis/. There are other sources to research surnames. The Roots Surname List Name Finder, http://www.rand.org/cgi-bin/Genea/rsl is a service run by the Rand Corp. Genealogy Club. They have archived almost 70,000 surnames that 4,500 genealogists have contributed to the Roots-L mailing list. A similar resource is the GENNAM-L Archive, at http://www.folio.com/folio.pgi/gennam-l_archive?. The Forscherkontakte (Research Contacts) site is unique. This is an extract of 44,000 surname entries from a BBS in Darmstadt, with contributors from five German genealogical societies. You search for a name, and if you get a match to can e-mail the Webmaster who will forward the address of the researcher in Germany who holds the data. Reach it at http://www.med.uni-giessen.de/~geneal/foko.html. 

Another interesting and comprehensive database is the Italian Surname Database, at http://www.xs4all.nl/~tardio/italname.htm. It contains 2,99 Italian surnames, sorted alphabetically, by city, province and region. 

 I just opened Pandora's box by mentioning a couple of specific ethnic resources. You want to know how to find your ancestors on the Web now, don't you? There are more than 800 genealogy sites on the World Wide Web and if I listed them all it would make a book. Let me point out two that are especially well-crafted. 

 Afrigeneas is dedicated to African-American Roots; it is tied into the Afrigneas mailing list. It is the most elegant genealogy site I visited and has a warm, comfortable feel. They welcome contributions from the public. Reach it at http://drum.ncat.edu/~afrigen. Another nice site is UK + Ireland Genealogy, at http://cs6400.mcc.ac.uk/genuki; its emphasis is self explanatory. Those of Irish ancestry might also check out IRLGEN: Tracing your Irish Ancestors, at http://www.bess.tcd.ie/roots_ie.htm. Both of these sites recognize that many Irish researchers come from abroad, and carefully explain how to conduct research long-distance. 

 The Texas State Electronic Library, http://link.tsl.texas.gov/, has some remarkable resources for genealogists. There are complete descriptions of everything held in the state archives, including military and pension records. There is an electronic form (go straight to it at http://link.tsl.texas.gov:80/0/.www/tsaref.dir/jcemail.html) You can request information via e-mail and receive your answer the same way. If there are documents that must be photocopied and mailed to you, you will be billed 10 cents a page. 

 Via the Internet I found out about two learning opportunities for novice genealogists. The Elderhostel program, open to those 55 years or older, offers programs on genealogy at Brigham Young University. You can get the Elderhostel catalog online at http://www.elderhostel.org and get course descriptions of all of their programs. Sometime this year the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) will be showing a 10 part series, Ancestors. This will be a complete how-to-do-it series on how to create your own family history. Episode nine focuses on computers and technology. You can keep tabs on the progress of this series by going to http://kbyuwww.byu.edu:80/series.htm. 

Remember this, taken from the genealogy joke page: Old genealogists never die; they just lose their census.