Some Comments on Netting Your Ancestors

Howells, Cyndi. Netting Your Ancestors: Genealogical Research on the Internet. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1997. 182 pages. Index.

There is nothing like dipping into an old book to show you how much things things have changed in twelve years. That rate of change is, in fact, what makes a book published in 1997 "old."

Here is a sentence from a section on Web tools: Ms. Howells points out that you will need,

"2. A dialer software application for your computer. Windows 95 comes with a dialer resident in the program."

Wow! Even I have had DSL for over a year now, and dial-up connections seem a little archaic now.

But while connection convenience and speed has changed, the 1997 instructions for using a browser have help up pretty well. Except that you may not be able to find anyone with a Netscape browser anymore.

There's a reference to Prodigy, and that's gone, too. In fact, the biggest area of change in the past twelve years is probably in the specific sites and utilities. Here is Cyndi's list of eight top search engines:

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
DejaNews
http://www.dejanews.com/
HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com/
InfoSeek Ultra
http://ultra.infoseek.com/
Lycos
http://www.lycos.com/
Web Crawler
http://webcrawler.com/
WhoWhere?
http://www.whowhere.com/
Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com/

No Google!

I suggest you try those eight sites to see how many of them are still functional.