Volume 17 Number 1 l January February 1998

National Genealogical Society Computer Interest Group (NGS/CIG DIGEST)
Permission granted by Carla Ridenour, Editor

The Internet and Genealogy  USGenWeb Digital Library

by Linda Russell Lewis
Rancho Cucamonga, California

It's apparent that the Internet is becoming a valuable tool for genealogy
researchers. A recent article, "The USGenWeb Phenomena" by Carmen
Finley, NGS/CIG Digest Volume 16 Number 5, detailed that project and
how the collective efforts of thousands of volunteers are helping
researchers get past those "dead ends." Since that article was published,
the USGenWeb Project has been made available at three URLs: www.usgenweb.com,
www.usgenweb.org, and usgenweb.net.

An expansion of that project, the USGenWeb Digital Library (Archives),
was established in July 1996 to support county coordinators by making
available unlimited webspace for storing transcribed primary documents,
as well as actual images of those documents. The webspace is provided
by Dr. Brian Leverich and Karen Isaacson of the Rootsweb Genealogical
Data Cooperative, http://www.rootsweb.com. In just a little over a
year, through the efforts of volunteers, the Archives file managers
have received and uploaded over 373 MB of data, or more than 200,000
printed pages. There is now an electronic search engine, broken down
by state, that enables a researcher to enter a surname and find every
file that contains a reference to that name. The file or files could
be a will, census data, marriage records, deeds, as well as biographies,
church records, cemetery listings, passenger lists, etc. The web address
(URL) is: http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb. The search engine is:
 http://searches.rootsweb.com/usgwarch.html.

Genealogical and Historical Societies, and the USGenWeb Project have
the same goals_to preserve genealogical and historical data and to
make it available to researchers. As the popularity of Internet genealogy
grows, some genealogical societies have expressed concern that their
many years of research and publishing data will be a thing of the
past, or that their source of income, used to preserve more records,
is threatened. There should not be any competition here. The idea
is for us all to work together respectfully to achieve our common
goals.

Several genealogical societies are working with the USGenWeb Project
and its Archives, by providing indexes to their books, or offering
the data to the Project. Some actually maintain webpages for their
county. In many cases, volunteers who are surveying cemeteries for
the USGenWeb Project are also donating their work to the local Genealogical
or Historical Society. Many of these surveys will end up in Society
Publications. In other cases, people have completed surveys for their
Societies and have also offered them to the Project so that they will
be available online to researchers.

Several authors and genealogical societies have found that book orders
have actually increased due to Internet exposure. Potential buyers
of the books are able to check the records on the Internet for names
they are researching and can find that the book does include information
on their ancestors. It seems that most researchers prefer to own the
published "source" as opposed to just picking up a fact from online
lists.

Expanding the original idea of this project, the USGenWeb Archives
Census Project was established in February 1997. The goal being to
make available transcriptions of every county census from 1790, concentrating
first on the year 1850. Again, volunteers were recruited, with Ken
Hollingsworth, the project coordinator, organizing a database of what's
already available and signing up volunteers to transcribe. Eventually,
there will be a digital database of every census taken in the US.

Coordinators of the various aspects of the USGenWeb Project have found
thousands of volunteers who are willing to use their spare time to
help put more genealogical data online. Where else but with the Internet
can you sit in your living room or home office and visit a courthouse
in Madison County TN, then with the click your mouse, view the cemetery
listings in Petersburg VA; click again and search the census households
of a county in Indiana.

 The possibilities  are endless, and you may one day be able to type
in an ancestor's name and find a complete family outline documented
with primary evidence, along with images of that primary evidence.
 USGenWeb is dedicated to assisting the family historian recognize
and use methods of research that provide them with accurate information
about their families.