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The following is a chapter from:
Trace Your Roots with DNA
by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak and Ann Turner
(reprinted with permission)
ONLINE LINEAGE COLLECTIONS
The second most useful resource, which contributed to 70 percent of the cases, is the ever-expanding collection of online family trees uploaded to the Internet by your fellow researchers. By these we mean the ones that can be found in such places as Ancestry World Tree (www.ancestry.com), World Family Tree (www.genealogy.com), and Ancestral and Pedigree Resource files (www.familysearch.org).we were actually surprised to find this resource so highly ranked, especially given the fact that it's no secret that there's plenty of misinformation in online lineages.Taking a closer look, we discovered that there's usually enough correct information about recent generations - the ones that are often the toughest to trace - to lead you to someone in the family today.The number and mushrooming content of online trees means that many of us will find some potential leads embedded in them, and making contact is easy since you can simply e-mail the individual who submitted the tree that interests you.
ONLINE PHONE DIRECTORIES
Online phone directories often provide the last bit of information necessary to make contact, so it's not surprising that they placed third in importance.Since approximately one-third of Americans have unlisted numbers, it makes sense that 60 percent of cases were facilitated with this resource. Our favorites change over time due to the shifting functionality, but our current default is www.whitepages.com, which incorporates handy features such as reverse lookups on phone numbers and addresses.If we chose to search several directories at once, www.theultimates.com gets our vote, and for international searches, www.infobel.com/teldir provides a valuable launching pad with its links to directories for countries around the globe.
SOCIAL SECURITY DEATH INDEX
We've already mentioned how useful the SSDI is, so if anything, we might have expected it to place higher than fourth.Many people found in the 1930 census can be traced forward in time by locating their SSDI entry, and the locations mentioned for last residence and benefit can point you to an area where you will find family members today.This information, in turn, can steer you to other resources, such as local newspapers that may have obituaries.
The SSDI is available for free at several sites on the Internet, and like phone directories, there functionality may be tweaked from time to time. These days, we tend to do most of our sleuthing at www.rootsweb.com and www.familysearch.org, two sites that offer complementary search flexibility (e.g., wildcards at Rootsweb and name variations at FamilySearch). We've also found Rootsweb to usually be the most up-to-date.
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North American office: P.O. Box 160, Carmine, TX 78932-0160 USA tel/fax: Toll free 866-7-DNA-DNA |
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