Ancestry Magazine 7/1/1997 July/August 1997 Vol. 15 No. 4 The USGenWeb Project - Jake Gehring With the advent of the World Wide Web, a new element of chaos has entered the world of genealogical research. For all its apparent benefits, the Web is an overwhelmingly large source of data with no inherent organization. No mechanism currently exists to inform researchers exactly where to look for valuable records, or whether those records exist. Even Internet search engines, often referred to as "electronic indexes" to the Web, only catalog a portion of its burgeoning contents. In the last year, however, volunteers participating in the USGenWeb project www.usgenweb.com have not only added significantly to the amount of valuable genealogical material available online, they have also lent a degree of order to an otherwise jumbled and often confusing system. To the Rescue The USGenWeb project is a grass-roots genealogical effort which allows any interested individual in the United States to sponsor a Web page devoted to his or her favorite county. Each county page may contain useful tips, lists of online databases particular to the area, research interest registrations, surname queries, descriptions of local libraries and their genealogical holdings, historical background information, and more. These pages are grouped together at the state and national level to help genealogists and historians coordinate their efforts and keep up to date on records, both on- and offline, which may assist them in their research. The project traces its beginnings to a small group of genealogists working to create home pages for various counties in Kentucky. The idea was to help people find information for any given county quickly and easily, as well as to centrally archive and index any databases created at the county level. For those who knew their ancestor's county of origin, these pages would then become a helpful starting point. Each page could contain a list of genealogical queries, maps and history of the county, a description of records available in local repositories, even searchable databases. A search of the central archive could assist those who were unsure of an exact residence in the state. Gathering Steam This initial effort was extremely successful. Volunteers were found to create and maintain the various county pages in just a few months. Having completed their efforts in Kentucky, project coordinators soon contacted volunteers to organize similar efforts in other states. As of February 1997, the project, now known as USGenWeb, had identified volunteers for seventy-seven percent of all U.S. counties. But assistance to the cause has not been restricted to individuals. Various genealogical societies and companies are supporting the USGenWeb's efforts. The National Genealogical Society issued a statement to help volunteers and users correctly create and apply material found on county and state pages. GoldBug Software (www.goldbug.com), creator of the AniMap Historical County Atlas, allows volunteers to use up to three AniMap historical maps on USGenWeb sites in exchange for attribution and a link to the AniMap Web page. The Roots Web Genealogical Data Cooperative (www.rootsweb.com) and other companies have offered free Web space to any county home page sponsor. Home Page Specifics The national and state coordinators of the USGenWeb program maintain guidelines and requirements which every county volunteer must follow. Therefore, every USGenWeb home page should have some basic items in common. The project requires that every page accept and display gen-ealogical queries. Each page should provide at least some basic research help, whether that be in the form of a research bibliography, a listing of important addresses, or actual genealogical data extracted from original or compiled sources. Many county home pages also contain hyperlinks to other WWW sites that contain helpful information. Each state page, in addition to providing links to each of its counties, often lists the year the county was formed and the name of the parent county (if any). Most state pages also archive the data-entry projects sponsored by individual counties, as well as providing information and databases which have a statewide scope. These state pages are listed alphabetically and can be accessed from the main USGenWeb home page, or users can point their browsers to http://www.usgenweb.com/xx, where xx is the two-letter abbreviation for the state in question. Momentum Builds The future of the USGenWeb project seems bright. With so many eager volunteers, each responsible for a U.S. county, developing a meaningful and helpful framework of information should be easy. The prospect of creating a national union catalog of genealogical resources, for example, is not quite so daunting when such an effort is completed one county at a time. National coordinators are now sponsoring an ambitious project whereby county volunteers transcribe federal census records. Any resultant data would be searchable at the county, state, and national levels, depending on how closely you could pinpoint your ancestor's location in a given census year. It is reassuring to know that some logical structure exists within the tangled webs of the Internet. Try visiting some USGenWeb county pages the next time you do survey research for a particular ancestor. As these home pages develop and improve, they may be the most convenient places to find listings of available records, historical background, maps, gazetteers, biographical information, methodological assistance, and even transcribed source data. Especially for those who are new to the World Wide Web, the jurisdictional organization that the USGenWeb project promises will make the ever-expanding global village more familiar-and more navigable. Jake Gehring holds a degree in family history and genealogy from Brigham Young University. He frequently lectures on computer-assisted research.