Getting Started
- Legacy Family Tree is my favorite genealogy software. The free version is very good and the pay version is inexpensive and it's a great program. Here is a feature comparison chart.
- Rootsweb Guide to Tracing Family Trees is a good place to learn.
- Free Forms from Family Tree Magazine has several blank forms you can download and use. Unfortunately they also have a disturbing number of ads on their pages and an annoying popup asking you to subscribe. Why you'd want to subscribe to such an annoying site is a mystery. But hey, good free forms. I like the Vital Records Chart and Military Records Checklist on the Record Worksheets page. They have several I haven't seen elsewhere. Seems they also have good Cheat Sheets. On the Computer Aids page is a pdf called Free Versions of Subscription Databases. Nice.
Research
- Finding Records in Louisiana tells you where to find primary and other sources for Louisiana research.
- Louisiana Cemeteries is a large site with info on many cemeteries in Louisiana, as well as lots of info about Louisiana Governors.
- Ancestry.com has a lot of good databases, most particularly the Federal Census records all online and searchable. A search of your ancestor brings up everything they have on him/her. I found great newspaper articles on one person on Ancestry. Unfortunately, this is a paid service. The prices are reasonable, far less than sending off for individual records.
- Acadian-Cajun Genealogy and History is an awesome website for Acadian information.
- Social Security Death Index shows birth and death dates, where the SS card was issued and last place the benefit was sent to. This database only contains people who received Social Security benefits.
Books
- Le Pays des Fleurs Oranges by William R. Stringfield. The Land of Orange Blossoms, 2nd edition, Volume 1, published 2001. A Genealogical Study of Creole Families of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. This lists genealogies of several families that moved from the Rhine River region of France, Germany, and Switzerland and settled this southern Louisiana parish.This is a large book, very good.
- The Internet Archive has over 8,000 published genealogy texts now in the public domain available for free download. Most appear to be surname specific.
- Project Gutenberg is a huge online repository of books in the public domain, generally books published before 1923. Fiction and non-fiction. Not a lot of specifically genealogy books, but a good bit of history and historical fiction. They are constantly adding new materials. One recently released is Dishes & Beverages of the Old South by Martha McCulloch-Williams, Published October 1913.
Lookup Requests
Website Tools
- This webspace is free from Rootsweb, and they provide a lot of other great stuff to check out.
- CPick is a great color tool.
- Screen Calipers lets you measure things on the screen.
- REL Link Checker Lite will check the links on your site and report which work and which are broken, so you can fix or delete the broken ones. It's easy to use and helps keep your website up to date.
- I write web pages with CSE HTML Validator, and I think it's awesome.
- FTP Surfer is for uploading your pages to the internet. It's small and fast and I have used it for years, works great.
- There are plenty of online picture gallery makers. I have used Web Picture Creator to make the online photo albums because it's the only one I could find that's simple yet gives me a lot of control over the look of the pages. It allows you to use css, or even to completely make your own template. Because of that, my photo gallery pages look like the rest of my website. (see my headstones photo album.) However the program has problems. It does allow you to use html and make your image descriptions as long as you want them (for a whole page of formatted content) but it doesn't remember the image descriptions when you exit, so I put them all in a separate file to copy and paste into the program each time I may want to regenerate the same album (to add new photos). That is by far the worst problem in my opinion. Unfortunately the program is apparently orphaned so the bugs won't be getting repaired. In fact, the paypal address doesn't work, so don't send any donations.
Website Tips
- If you want people to be able to find your website and information through search engines (google, etc.), you have to have the information typed out on your web pages. Some search engines also include content of pdf and other file types, but not if the content is images. Information in databases or in images will not show up in search engine results, which means people searching will not find it.
- Visitors will enter your website on any page, so it's important to have links to the rest of your website on every page, preferably in the same place so they're easy to find. Do not assume that everyone will begin on the homepage and follow links from there, you'd be very much mistaken and you could make navigating your site anywhere from difficult to nearly impossible.
- Every time you add a new link, test it by clicking on it. Do not assume it works - test it. Also, check your links occasionally to be sure they're still good. There are programs that will test links for you, I have suggested one in the Website Tools section. When a visitor finds a bunch of dead links, they generally leave.
- Do not assume that everyone has the same monitor resolution and bandwidth as you do. Keep your images relatively small, link to larger files so you don't severely slow page loading time. Do not make your design wider than 1024px, it won't display well on smaller resolutions if it's too wide. The best option is to have it no specific width so that it will adjust to your visitor's resolution. (Make this window smaller to see my page resize itself, and notice none of the images on this site are very wide.)
- Don't have automatic playing music on your pages, it slows loading times, and annoys the hell out of your visitors, regardless of how charming you may believe it to be. If you must offer music, make it optional. Anyone who wants to hear it will click it. Same goes for video.