If you want to find out whether a relative you have lost touch with, but who may be able to help you with your research is online, you can try looking for them through an e-mail address database such as www.bigfoot.com or through Yahoo!'s People Search at www.yahoo.com.

Personal web pages

You may be able to find relatives simply by typing your family name into a search engine. There has been a proliferation of personal websites over recent years. Some of them have dreadful music, "amusing" animations and/or photographs, and are really no more than an electronic version of those letters some people send out to their friends and relations at Christmas ("Gervase continues to surprise us all with his success at school and Valerie is still having problems with her feet"). But some are genuinely informative. Cyndi's List has a page of links to personal web pages (www.cyndislist.com/personal.htm).

Databases of names

You can also look for relatives using some of the databases that are available online. These work just like those lists of names at the back of magazines, such as Family History Monthly and Family Tree Magazine. The most comprehensive, for UK researchers, are the regional surname lists hosted by Genuki which you can find listed by county at www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/genuki/surnameslist/. Here you will find links to all the listings of different surnames that are being compiled nationwide, alongside the names and e-mail addresses of the researchers. The GenForum site (www.genforum.familytreemaker. com) contains the names of people (mostly from the US) who are looking for ancestors, and if you think a branch of your family may have emigrated it is worth looking there.

Genuki will also help you to make contact with local family history societies where you stand an excellent chance of finding distant cousins who are still living and researching in the areas your ancestors originated from. I have made contact with my fourth-cousin-once-removed in this way, who lives a short distance from the farmland in Cardiganshire where our common ancestors lived and worked for many generations.

As well as the Guild of One Name Studies at www.one-name.org, Rootsweb has a large mailing list for surnames at resources.rootsweb.com/surnames. You simply select the relevant letter of the alphabet, choose your surname from the list that appears and look for it among the assortment of databases.

Ancestral files and Gedcoms

A number of people have published the results of their research and you may be lucky enough to discover a family tree already compiled and featuring some of your ancestors. When using the IGI on the Familysearch site, for example, you may notice that an ancestor comes up with a special button and link attached to his or her individual record, indicating there is an ancestral file in the LDS Church (Mormon) database. Ancestral files are collections of genealogical information collated from pedigree charts and family group sheets submitted to the LDS Church over the past 20-odd years. The information has not been verified in any way, so, needless to say, you should use it only as a basis for your own research and be sure to check the contents against the primary sources.

You will come across the term Gedcom a great deal as you penetrate deeper into the world of e-genealogy. Genealogical Data Communications is the standard file format for genealogists, enabling them to export their research databases, the contents of family charts and family group sheets, and share them with others. Gedcoms appear on your computer screen as a chronological list of names and dates written in plain text, so they can be easily read on a number of different machines and systems.

You make Gedcoms with special genealogical software. You can find out more by visiting the principal hosting project for Gedcoms, Worldconnect, at Rootsweb, www.worldconnect.rootsweb.com. On this site you can find out how to upload (that is post on the net) Gedcoms and make use of the search feature to visit the Gedcoms uploaded by other researchers. There are more than 10m names on this free site.

Several commercial sites offer a similar service, but they levy a subscription charge and some of them retain copyright in your research and prevent you from posting it elsewhere. The Genserv site (www.genserv.com) carries more than 12,000 Gedcoms, which you can search for a small fee once you have submitted your own Gedcom.

You can try out Gedcom software for free at the Brother's Keeper site (ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/brothers_keeper/), at the Cumberland Family site (www.cf-software.com) or via Kindred Konnections (www.kindredkonnections.com). The Familysearch site (www.familysearch.org) has its Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software available for free download, which can be used on both Macs and PCs. Dave Wilks has put together a very informative FAQ page on Gedcoms at www.my-ged. com/faqs.html. If you want to see an example of a Gedcom, look at the one on the My Gedcom site www.my-ged.com/gedcom.txt which displays part of George Washington's ancestral file. This example has been compiled using Ancestral Quest software, the basis for the Familysearch PAF system, and is one of the more competitively priced packages available.

To find out more about the technical aspects of Gedcoms, visit www.tiac.net/users/pmcbride/gedcom. 55gctoc.htm.

Discussion groups, listservs, newsgroups, messageboards and chatrooms:

The internet offers a number of ways to network and make contact with other genealogists, sharing tips, research and information.

E-mail discussion groups, or listservs, dedicated to just about every conceivable genealogical topic, are legion. They all have their own rules, which you should find out about before subscribing and you should also spend some time reading the e-mail lists to see if the discussions are likely to engage you. You can find a list of lists at www.liszt.com.

To subscribe to an e-mail list you send an e-mail to the manager of the list indicating your wish to become a member, entering the word "subscribe" in the Subject field. The message should just consist of the list name and your name. If you want to unsubscribe you send a similar message with "unsubscribe" in the subject field of your e-mail.

Rootsweb carries a huge collection of mailing lists. You can browse the list at www.rootsweb.com ~maillist and after registering you can access old messages in the archive (archiver.rootsweb.com).

Newsgroups, sometimes also referred to as messageboards, are electronic forums, wherein users post messages, called "articles", to one another. You can find out more about them by using the newsgroup command on Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger or NewsXpress. The last time I looked there were a vast number of topics covered of interest to genealogists - for example, adoptees, Irish genealogists, Jewish genealogists and so on - and there is also a newsgroup dedicated to British and Irish researchers who are just beginning their research.

To search for newsgroups use the Newsgroup option on your search engine, or visit www.deja.com which lets you search newsgroup articles on genealogy topics. Genuki also lists some county-based forums on its county pages.

Chatrooms allow you to interact with other people in real time, like having a telephone conversation on the internet. You need to have reasonable typing skills. However, you should never simply key in "chatroom" on a search engine unless you want to take part in lurid, not to say alarming, conversations of a highly dubious nature. The Liszt site is very easy to use and has a large selection of chat channels for you to search (www.liszt.com/chat/).

Netiquette

As with all successful examples of human society down the millennia, a system of codes and conventions governing people's behaviour has evolved on the internet. No doubt in the future "netiquette" will be a subject ripe for anthropological study - theses are, no doubt, being prepared even now. The rules are quite basic and do not defy the codes of practice most of us adhere to in our offline lives.

Always acknowledge any help you receive from someone you contact over the net, and don't ask for help with anything you could easily find out for yourself. Try to reciprocate whenever you can, or at least make the offer. Most genealogists are helpful souls by nature and simple gestures, such as offering to look up a birth in the GRO index next time you are going, are much appreciated.

When taking part in a discussion group, forum or chatroom, try to stick to the point. If you don't, you might find your fellow members becoming more than a tad irritated. Make sure the subject line of your contribution gives others a good indication of what you are writing about. Don't be vague, but don't bind on too much, either.

When replying using the Reply to Author feature on your e-mail programme, make sure you delete all the previous messages irrelevant to this particular communication.

Use a standard font - such as Arial - as your default setting for e-mail messages. Fancy fonts may not be readable to other computers and can even cause systems to crash. Similarly, the stationery options that come with some internet software do not always carry to other computers.

Take sensible precautions when replying to messages or in chatrooms. Do not give out personal details until you are confident you can trust the other person. Never, ever send credit card information over the net unless you are on a secure site. You can tell a site is secure when the URL starts https:// and a padlock icon appears in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen.

Finding people who are not online

While finding relatives and other genealogists has been made much easier through the internet, not everybody is online. Never forget, however, that finding offline resources is one of the very best uses for the internet. There are many telephone directories online, including British Telecom's PhoneNet UK (www.bt.com/phonenetuk/), which allows you to search the entire country by surname for listed telphone numbers. For international phone directories try www.teldir.com.

Publishing on the internet

Building a web page of your own is a good way to enable long-lost relatives to find you, and it is surprisingly easy. There is a vast amount of information on the subject available through your computer, including probably everything you need to know in one of the software bundles that came with your word processing package. If not, there is good selection of suitable software packages available at www.hotwired.com.

Cyndi's List has an exhaustive collection of links and topics pages under the title of Cyndi's Genealogy Homepage Construction Kit (www.cyndislist.com/ construc.htm) and you should be able to find everything you could ever wish to know there. Yahoo! carries a page in its Guides and Tutorials section which is very informative. Go to www. yahoo.com/computers_ and_internet/internet/world_wide_web/.

Peter Christian has written two extremely good and easy to understand articles on web page creation for the Society of Genealogists online publication, Computers in Genealogy, which you can download at www.sog.cig.org.uk/cig/vol5/509christian.html and www.sog.cig.org.uk/cig/vol5/510christian.html.

You don't have to know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in order to write a web page as many programmes can translate your files for you. But if you want to find out more The Bare Bones Guide to HTML (werbach.com/barebones/index.html) is a very good basic explanation with lots of links to other web page construction sites.

Once you have built your page you will want to upload it to the internet. You may have some free web space as part of your package with your Internet Service Provider. You can take advantage of the free web space offered by Rootsweb at freepages. rootsweb.com/ but I would recommend registering with Submit.com (www.submit.com) if you want other search engines to be able to find you, as some do not run on the Rootsweb pages. You will also need a web address and there are several places where you can register your name for free (if available). Try www.freenetname.co.uk or www.ukreg.com.