Family Search

Aside from its humdrum uses for e-mail and Wikipedia, the internet is the most powerful resource available today for family search. You can network with family on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. You can search whitepages.com and search for living family members. You can keep up with family members' lives by reading their blogs.

If you're adopted, you can use adoption forums and online services to find and contact your birth parents.

You can learn more about genealogy and family search on sites like CyndisList.com, or you can search for specific ancestors on sites like FamilySearch.org. You can search original genealogical records at Ancestry.com and at pilot.familysearch.org.

Credibility
As you're searching online resources, be wary of taking genealogical facts at face value. Unless you view an original record yourself-a census record from Ancestry.com, for instance, or a parish baptism record on Family Search pilot-you can't know for sure what the record says. For that reason, when you read genealogical "facts" such as birth dates and marriage dates, you should pay attention to where the information comes from. On Family Search, for instance, much of the information is user-submitted. The "facts" are only as good as the researcher who submitted them. Unless the submitter included his or her sources, you should use this information only for leads rather than accepting it as true.

Labs
On Family Search pilot, census records, parish records, and others are indexed by volunteers and then made available to search for free. You can search these records at pilot.familysearch.org, or you can do a family search for specific ancestors in these records at labs.familysearch.org. At the labs site, you can also access the Research Wiki, where you can learn research strategies and consult with others about tackling difficult research problems.