Welcome to this first in a series of columns on using the computer to access important and valuable genealogical information. Using a computer, you can quickly locate records and sources of primary (and other) evidence. You can also use the computer to make connections with other researchers working on the same lines as yourself and share information with them. I also hope to show you ways to organize and preserve the information you find, as well as the information you already have. Though I have a great deal of experience with computers, I am relatively new to genealogy, having started my Quest in January, but I hope that these columns will be both easily understandable and extremely useful to you.

I know that most of you have spent your entire genealogical careers acquiring information and evidence by using basic research methods. Let me say, at the outset, that computers will not replace basic research methods. They can, however, speed up your search considerably, saving you hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of research in finding useful sources of primary and other evidence and can deliver that information to you almost instantly and almost always free of charge.

To keep things simple and understandable, I intend to stay away from technical details whenever possible. This should be easy because, as genealogists, we don't really care how a computer works; we just want to know what to do with it and how to do it. It is my sincere hope that you will let me know if anything in these columns is confusing or unclear. That way, I can clarify it in future columns. Before we get started, a few basic definitions would be useful . . .

I would venture to guess that most, if not all, of you have a basic understanding of what computers are and what they can do. Computers are good at acquiring, manipulating, storing and communicating information. Typically, you type information in on your keyboard and view it on your screen or print it out using a printer. You can also send and receive information to and from your computer and other computers over ordinary telephone lines. Since each of us, as genealogists, accumulate a great deal of information, you can see how tremendously valuable it would be to be able to exchange that information with others. That's exactly what computers allow us to do.

The Internet is simply a way of connecting computers together over ordinary telephone lines. At this time, there are millions of computers all over the world hooked together in this way. You can easily hook your computer up to the Internet, or you can use the computers at libraries and universities, or the computers of friends who are hooked up to the Internet, to access the vast resources it has to offer.

The World Wide Web is a large and growing part of the Internet. To understand it clearly, I would like you to picture a HUGE bulletin board, much like the kind you find in supermarkets or at the community center only much, much larger. Anyone can walk up to this board and post a sheet of paper on it containing any information they wish to pass on to the community-at-large. We'll call that sheet a "page". Any other person can then view that page or any other page that has been posted on the board.

Suppose, after you've posted a page on the board, that you find another page on the board, posted by someone else, that you think is very interesting or is related in some way to yours. Suppose you'd like to let people reading your page know about this other page. You could write a little note on your page saying "Hey, there's a neat page on the second row from the bottom, the third one from the left" or something of the kind, but that would be pretty confusing if there were very many pages on the board. It might be easier to simply stick a thumbtack in your page, stick another thumbtack in the page you want to direct people to and tie a piece of string from one tack to the other. That way, when people wanted to see this other interesting page, they could simply follow the string from your page and arrive at the other one. That's what the World Wide Web is all about. It's simply a huge collection of pages, posted by people all over the world, that you can view on your computer screen. You can tell your computer to search for pages that contain a particular name (such as "Sturdevant" or "Hostetter") or a particular word or phrase (such as "Genealogy" or "National Archives") and it will go find them and put them on your screen for you to look at, copy or print. And each page can contain buttons called links, which act as connections to other pages like the thumbtack-and-string we just talked about: press the button and you are instantly (or almost instantly) transported to the other page. Pretty amazing, huh? That's all the technical stuff we need for now. Wasn't that easy?

There is a tremendous amount of material on the World Wide Web (let's just call it "the Web", for short; shall we?) that is interesting and valuable to genealogists. As a personal example, I will tell you that a search on the Web of the name "Bray" turned up almost a hundred pages, all over the world, by people named Bray (as well as places like Bray, Ireland) who had posted pages. One of them turned out to be a 2nd cousin I didn't even know I had. She was able to direct me to several other unknown relatives (three 1st cousins once-removed and another 2nd cousin). Of those people, two of them had been doing family research and one had written down stories and history told to him by a Great Aunt of mine and by my Great-Great-Grandmother on my father's side!! Among the other resources that can be found on the Web, there are:

• A complete Social Security Death Index

• Indexes to U.S. Census records from 1790 to 1890

• Records of the National Archives and Records Administration

• The Roots Surname List, listing thousands of surnames with location and time data and listing the names and addresses of genealogists like us who are researching these lines.

• Compiled lists and indexes of immigration records and shipıs passenger lists

• World-wide exchanges of family tree data from other genealogists that you can search to find relatives and persons in lines you are interested in.

• Pages that show the family tree and much additional information about the person posting the page, with e-mail contact information for them.

• Nationwide cemetery indexes