Genealogy WebRings are interconnected web pages within the World Wide Web. These groups of pages all relate to genealogy topics only. Each page is directly linked to others relating to similar subjects such as regional, ethnic, single surname, etc. A WebRing is a more practical alternative for information gathering than using the usual search engines, which more often than not lead to dead-ends.

As you visit one person's page on a WebRing you can easily click the link to the next person's page, and, theoretically, continue all the way around the ring and back to your starting place, given enough time. Other choices from each page allow you to go backwards in the ring or to randomly bounce from page to page. I've spent more than one full evening just visiting pages in a particular German genealogy WebRing, gathering useful data, maps, surnames and even corresponding with some of the families that have home pages.

The idea of WebRings began in May 1995. How many rings are there? No one knows for sure. A pretty good count last spring (1998) put the total at about 46,000 with over half a million member pages. How many deal specifically with genealogy is unknown - but it's in the thousands!
 
Some good starting places to learn about WebRings include the "Genealogy World WebRing":
http://genealogyworld.com/gw-ring.htm
 
or the "Genealogy Pages WebRing": http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/8907/gp/gpring. htm
or "Trees of Families": http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/1749/    webring. htm

written for Treasure Chest News, Feb. 1999, the newsletter of the Central FL Genealogical Society.  Used with permission.