Everyone becomes interested in genealogy at some point in life. It starts with looking in the phone books for your name when you travel. Then one day you go to the library to leaf through other people's family histories. Maybe you send a letter off to relatives in Israel, hoping to hear back within a month. You kick yourself for not asking more questions when the matriarchs and patriarchs of your clan were still alive. This is the genealogist's bug, and there's every good reason to get it. However, it is often followed by the genealogist's frustration, when one realizes there are more people on the earth than ever expected, and that it would take centuries to assemble the necessary data from collections at single libraries. But now there's a solution. The Internet has revolutionized the art of genealogical pursuit.

Every day, people turn to the Internet to discover relatives, both deceased and living, from all over the world. Family trees are growing from dozens of names to hundreds or thousands. The web shrinks distances down to nothing. Web genealogists are corresponding daily with new relatives and friends in South America, Russia, Holland, Australia, Singapore, Israel, and almost every other stretch of land on Earth.

The benefits of web research are inestimable. Of course, not everyone has access to computers, or the knowledge, confidence, or time to learn how to use them. But most of us have at least one whiz-kid relative (perhaps a child or grandchild) who can sit with us for ten minutes to search the web. It has now become a necessity for genealogical research.

So let's take a step-by-step tour of how you might begin your research.

Instead of flipping through phone books when you pass through a new city, you can now search entire phone books from at least 36 countries all over the world. For North America, just go to the following address: http://www.switchboard.com. You type in a name... it returns any matches. For phone books from around the world, try http://www.infobel.be/infobel/infobelworld.html.

There's no need to worry about excess information access on the internet: there is nothing on the web that one cannot find out elsewhere (and always could). The internet only represents a convergence of information, obviating the need to travel to each library, each city, each country.

The second thing to try are the websites known as a search engines (for example, try http://www.altavista.com). A search engine will ask you to type in a string of text, such as your surname, and it will immediately report to you all sites on the net (of the tens of millions) where that text can be found. Search engines are only a starting point, but often prove valuable right away. Also try http://www.yahoo.com.

For more focussed research, you're in luck: there are a core group of web sites specializing in genealogy, and a large number of those concentrate on Jewish research. For example, large groups of volunteers have been collaborating for years to build online databases of birth and death records from Poland (http://www.jewishgen.org/reipp), Jewish cemeteries across the globe (http://www.jewishgen.org/cemetery/index.html), and Yizkor (memorial) book collections (http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor.html). A further example is the ShtetLinks project, a web-space recreation of small Jewish communities from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Anyone researching a particular community is encouraged to contribute photographs and information, so that others researching the same shtetl can "visit" their ancestors' home. Besides the benefit to genealogists, there's a real philosophy behind such ventures: people are working as a team, distributed around the world, to fashion an accurate model of communities that no longer exist.

In a turn of good fortune, almost all the Jewish sites have all been brought together under the aegis of JewishGen, a single web site created and run by Susan King of Houston, Texas. JewishGen (http://www.jewishgen.org) allows researchers to find special interest groups, free translation services, mentor programs, family trees, and information files on everything from landsmanshaftn to directories to important addesses. JewishGen has tapped into a Jewish pulse: researchers are mobilizing world-wide to contribute to the dozens of active projects. In the past few years, the site has grown organically, branching into unforeseen projects, fed by the hundreds of volunteers and fueled by the success stories reported each week.

JewishGen also hosts a newsgroup (a newsgroup is roughly like a cork bulletin board in web-space where people around the world post messages). The JewishGen newsgroup is the hot spot for direct contact, advice, and discussion on the web—and the major wellspring for individual success stories. Last year I posted a message seeking information about a rabbi who died in Philadelphia in 1913 (he was my great-grandfather's brother). I gave the only sketchy details I knew, and the next morning I received an email from a man who was the rabbi's great-grandson—my third cousin. By exploiting a centralized site for research, we were able to connect hundreds of people in a single stroke.

The Jewish Genealogical Family Finder (JGFF) is also online (http://www.jewishgen.org/jgff). The JGFF is a collaboration of almost four thousand researchers sharing and seeking information on given surnames and towns. The online version of the JGFF is superior to the former (paper) version, since one can now search by the exact, partial, or phonetic spelling of a surname. This especially befits Jewish genealogy, where name spellings change so fluidly. As of last year, you can submit (or revise) your surnames online.

To further stimulate research, thousands of genealogists (including me) have posted their family trees on the net, for easy access by other researchers. Unfortunately, this has exhumed some painful privacy issues to which the Jewish community is especially attuned. Every student of the Holocaust recalls certain small incidents that stab to the quick—for me, one of them is the sham Jewish genealogy contest hosted by the Nazi party shortly after they came to power. The government printed up contest forms for submitting Jewish genealogy; the information was later exploited in the Holocaust. Privacy is far from a settled issue among web-genealogists, and there seem to be at least three main camps. Those in the first camp put all their genealogy online. The second camp is content to do this as long as no personal information (such as birthdate) is revealed the living. The third camp (of which I am a member) posts an alphabetical list of names to the net, and anyone who recognizes a surname can email for further information—which is furnished with a balance of genealogist's generosity and discretion.

The benefits of web research are inestimable. A single connection can link enormous branches, with hundreds of people discovering new relations from the click of a mouse. Does this sound the death-knell for the older methods of genealogy research? To the contrary, some genealogists express reservations about the popularity of net-genealogy. This has something to do with old-school dogmas confronted with new tricks. But there are also some real caveats to be noted. The first is that net-genealogy is not (yet) a substitute for other kinds of research: the letter-writing, flipping-through-ship-records, squinting-at-microfilm kind of research. In fact, the single largest, most valuable repository of genealogical records—the Mormon Church of the Latter Day Saints—is not online. The second caveat is that any information obtained on the web needs real-world verification. That, of course, applies to anything in life.

Jewish researchers are not the only ones on the web; a quick surf reveals genealogists of every stripe. But there are ways in which Jewish genealogical research differs from non-Jewish research. Our main obstacles come from the burning and destruction of records in this millennium's anti-Semitic conflagrations. Of further difficulty is that, with the exception of some Sephardic and Rabbinic families, Jews did not bother with surnames until the governments of Eastern Europe enforced them for record keeping 200 years ago. And when these surnames were assigned by the local authorities, they were often chosen in order to embarrass the Jewish bearer. Many Jews felt no particular attachment to their surname, and did not hesitate to modify it to their local environment. The bright side of Jewish genealogy comes from the zeal with which the Jewish community bands together to pursue, extract, and preserve historical information. A short session of net-surfing will make clear the passion of the Jewish people to remember—as we do at Passover—and to record for our children and our children's children, so that they may remember, too.

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Social Security Death Index: http://www.infobases.com/ssdi

National Archives and Records Administration: http://www.nara.gov

Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov

Helm's Genealogy Tool Box: http://genealogy.tbox.com/genealogy.html

The RootsWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com

RAND Genealogy: http://www.rand.org

World family tree project: http://www.familytreemaker.com

Avotaynu, Inc.: http://www.avotaynu.com

United States Holocuast Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/index.html

Gendex (over 2.5 million names): http://www.gendex.com

David Egelman, PhD is a genealogist, a novelist, and a Neuroscientist.