Last month, I reviewed online genealogical sites including “list” sites; state and county sites; genealogical society sites; and the passenger manifest sites castlegarden.org and ellisisland.org. To continue:

Stevemorse.org: Stephen Morse (http://stevemorse.org/) has sites that allow searches of émigrés to Castle Garden and Ellis Island but also to Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, as well as Canadian and other ports.

After a search, the user is redirected to the site that holds the information; for example, castlegarden.org or ellisisland.org. For other ports, you’ll be redirected to Ancestry.com, reviewed below. If the redirection site requires subscription (payment) and/or registration, you’ll have to do so before you can actually view the information.

Morse’s sites allow direct viewing of manifests by ship name and voyage date. This can be helpful if other searches have led to a manifest supposedly for your ancestor but with incorrectly recorded information due to a computer error by ellisisland.org, etc. You can look at the manifests page by page until you find the correct one.

RootsWeb: RootsWeb (www.rootsweb.com) is the Internet’s oldest genealogy site. It’s free and is now affiliated with Ancestry.com, reviewed below. The site is loaded with features, including genealogy hints, surname searches, etc.

Some of the links lead to sites or services that must be paid for; however, one major service is free. RootsWeb posts actual family trees of others who have uploaded them. These trees can be searched by a person’s name, and you may find your ancestor in a tree that was researched and posted by someone else, possibly a relative. You can contact the author of the tree for further information.

The trees are only as good as the authors and may or may not contain details such as birthplaces, exact birth dates, etc. However, this site can be very valuable. If you have your own family tree in a database, you can upload it for others to see, opening the potential that long-lost relatives may see it and contact you.

Having a tree available to online viewers is a way to connect with others researching the same families. RootsWeb is easy to navigate and provides various formats to view your data. For privacy, the displays do not show the names of anyone living but born after 1930, protecting their privacy.

Similar sites are the free sites GenCircles (www.gencircles.com) and Findyourfamilytree.com. There are numerous other sites with similar information, which can be found through an Internet search for “family trees,” but be forewarned: Most require paid registration, or at a minimum, your email address so that you can be put on their advertising mailing list.

Ancestry.com and FamilySearch: I’ve discussed both of these sites in detail in the past. Ancestry.com is a paid subscription site that provides images of varied original documents: passenger manifests, U.S. censuses, U.S. naval muster rolls, etc., while FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) is the Mormon genealogy site that provides lists of vital records, such as microfilms available for rental or video courses on research for specific nationalities.