ON-LINE Genealogy (Climbing Your Family Tree)
So you've always wanted to forage through the leafy branches of your family tree, but didn’t fancy spending the necessary hours poring over a mountain of dusty documents. Hold on a minute, surely that modern wonder known as the world-Wide web holds the key? Sadly, no. Unless I’ve been looking in the wrong place there’s no qwck free site where you can type in a few details and hey presto, there’s your glorious ancestry laid out before your eyes. But before y0u get downhearted there are many Sites which can aid you on your arduous Journey to discover your roots.
Before you leap in, it’s worth procuring a copy of The Good Web Guide to Genealogy (The Good Web GUide, £12.99). Saving you a lot of time and effort, it lists the top 100 sites, as well as providing adVice about how to get started. So what do they recommend?
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www.cyndislist.com comes highly rated. Its creator, Cyndi Howells is an all-American gal who has made it her life’s work to bring together every imaginable resource for tracing yOur family history. With over 78,850 links to other sites it’s a pretty daunting prospect, but beginners can refer to her ’Frequently Asked Questions’ section to get started. To add that personal touch, the ’newest IWig on her family tree’, baby Euan, gets a page all to himself.
You might not want to iorn the Mormons, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (in an attempt to baptise ancestors posthumously into the Mormon faith) is creating a huge database of ancestral records. The results can be
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seen at www.familysearch.org With links to census, military, land and legal
records. Enter details into the ancestral search field and you might get lucky. Sadly, my efforts seemed to suggest my grandfather was born in 1748. Oh well, onto the next one.
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category, www.9enuki.org.uk is a Virtual reference library of data. Pretty much every question you need to ask about how to track down records is answered here. There IS a wealth of ’primary material’ drawn from actual historical documentation here (church records, court records, cemeteries) but to work your way through it you need to know which c0unty yOur ancestors inhabited, then you’ll find you’re mostly directed to a real world bUilding where you have to check out records on paper. Yet again, denied the quick fix.
After all this trawling you’ll be in need of a little light entertainment, so instead of ploughing thrOugh all the (undoubtedly helpful) information on
www.rootsweb.com, go straight to their 'famous and infamous’ section. Here you’ll find Walt Disney's link to a Wizard from Salem Village and EIVis’s alleged shared ancestry With President Carter. if only it was so eaSy to discover your own roots. But it isn’t. So by all means use the internet as a gUIde but, for the moment anyway, there’s no av0iding Visiting your local public records office. (Louisa Pearson)
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The world of the web
Live Concerts wwwliveconcertscom
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This is a bit of a find. The bulk of the site is Real Audio clips from a New York radio station which features interViews With some major mUSICIBHS. The clips can be the entire show up to an hour long, and usually contain live sets, played exclusively for the show.
Scotland Net
www.scotland.net
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Just what you’d expect from the name, really (unless you think it’s a big net for catching Scotlands). A Scottish web portal With the very latest local news, sport and weather. It you want to keep up to date with all things Caledonian it’s well worth making this your homepage. Although it’s not a new idea (a bit like an e-Reporting Scotland), it’s a local Site for local people.
Script-o-Rama www.script-o-rama.com
Another film script site, but one With a few differences. Along With complete
screenplays, there are some first drafts and details of cut scenes. There is also a faCility by which the more sad
INTERNET
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among you can download and learn seminal scenes from films and re-enact them to amazed friends in the pub.
TV Commercials www.televisioncommercialscom
We love them and we hate them. Channel 4 even hosted a Viewers’ poll about them. TV adverts are part of the culture so here we have a clips show featuring the best of them. With a searchable database, it’s highly possible you can track down yOur favourites; and they might even persuade you to buy something.
Icebox www.icebox.com
Now, before I go on, l haven’t been able to get this site to work, but I know people who have, and it’s apparently very funny. So on With the second-hand reView . It’s a cartoon Site featuring top crime-busting friends — golfing hero, Jack Nicklaus and EMS Presley (before they were famous) — following their eprOits and Sherlock- type deductions. Good luck getting it to work and laugh for me if you do.
Dump The Pubs
wwwdumpthepubscom
If they can try it With fuel, why can’t they try it With beer.7 Don’t we all want lower taxes on beer? It w0uldn’t save us any money, because we’d JUSi drink more, but that’s academic. If you feel strongly enough about it, get your beer belly along and blockade your local brewery. However, if we were to drink more beer, l’d personally like to see the cutting of taxes on taxis. (Steve Blair)
Icebox is a cartoon site featuring crime-busting friends Jack Nicklaus and Elvis Presley
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