Genealogy SiteFinder Quickly Links You to Thousands of Internet Sites

With Genealogy SiteFinder, not only do you get a title and link to the Web site, but also a brief description of its contents to help you determine if a site will be helpful for your research before you follow the link. That saves you time and money if you have to pay for the time that you spend online.

Here are some examples of how the Genealogy SiteFinder works. If you're trying to find ancestors who once lived in Philadelphia, you can peruse the "United States: Pennsylvania" links in the "Places" category to see if there are helpful Internet sites that can help your search. Trying to find out more about African-American ancestors? Go to the "People" category, then the "Ethnic/Religious Groups" sub-category, and browse the "African-American" links.

There are three different ways to locate information in the Genealogy SiteFinder:

• When you aren't in a hurry, you can browse through all of the topics and sub-topics until you find the type of links that you need.
• To locate topics more quickly, scroll through the alphabetical index of keywords taken from the site descriptions. Clicking a keyword shows you a list of the sites whose descriptions contain that word.
• The third alternative is to use Family Tree Maker Online's sitewide search engine, deselecting all of the check boxes except for the one that's labeled "Genealogy SiteFinder" and then typing in the word or name you want to find.

We're constantly adding more links to the Genealogy SiteFinder, and you can help! If you know of Web sites that we've not yet listed, tell us about them and we will add them to the Genealogy SiteFinder as soon as we can, usually within a few weeks. Just fill out our Add a Site form with the name of the site, its URL, and a brief description. You can also tell us which sections of the Genealogy SiteFinder you think it belongs in. Since the Genealogy SiteFinder is free to the entire genealogy community, suggesting a new link is a great way to help out your fellow genealogists. With that in mind, be sure to tell us about all of your favorite sites -- who knows, maybe someone else will suggest the site that you've been looking for.

Genealogy SiteFinder had its roots in Helm's Genealogy Toolbox, which premiered on the Internet in February 1995 containing a mere 134 links in 12 categories. It was the second comprehensive genealogical site available on World Wide Web and its goal was to provide a one-stop list of all Internet sites of interest to genealogists.

After only a few months, the traffic on the Genealogy Toolbox was so great that Matthew Helm was asked to move the site to another provider. The Toolbox was moved to a private provider temporarily while its own server and Internet connection were set up. In December 1995, Toolbox Internet Marketing Services, Inc. was born and by February 1996, Helm's Genealogy Toolbox was housed on its own server. The Toolbox went through two more versions in the next year and a half.

In December of 1997, Broderbund Software and Toolbox Internet Marketing Services, Inc. launched the Genealogy SiteFinder, a joint project to merge the content of Helm's Genealogy Toolbox with the technology of Broderbund Software. The goal of the Genealogy SiteFinder is to produce the most comprehensive and informative index of genealogical resources on the Internet.

Helm's Genealogy Toolbox is still maintained by Matthew, as well as his wife April Leigh Helm. Matthew is the creator of Helm's Genealogy Toolbox and a number of other World Wide Web sites. He holds an A.B. in History and M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the Director of Human Resources Information Systems for the University of Illinois. He is also Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer for Toolbox Internet Marketing Services, Inc. and a company commander in the Illinois Army National Guard. April Leigh Helm is President of Toolbox Internet Marketing Services, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Online Genealogy. She holds a B.S. in Journalism and Ed.M. in Higher Education Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.