Funny coincidence--somebody I knew 30 years ago is doing the same kinds of
searches you are, Matthew, and funnier yet is that he found me, given the
number of grief counselors, piebakers, and soccer coaches currently using my
name (same spelling and all!).

Where the Net's made a big difference for me is in genealogy, a longtime
interest but one rarely pursued for lack of time and travel funds (when they
teach you the second law of genealogy--"follow the land"--they mean
literally!). The first law (if anyone's interested) is "everything is tied
to counties," and the third law is "follow the money." The Net/Web world of
linked and ringed connections is just made for the genealogist, and I've
enjoyed subscribing to such arcane lists and databases as California Death
Index, Cleveland Necrology File, and the Old Orphanages list (on which
someone recently posted a query as to whether "ALL orphanage records of some
period have been lost in a fire, or is that just the standard form-letter
answer they use?"). There's a message board or a listserv for everything
imaginable (just came across one for genealogists who want to share info. on
"people who are supposedly dead but turn up alive"!) And the timing of all
this genealogical ease-of-linking has coincided with a movement toward
opening up or making public all sorts of previously hard-to-obtain
records--BMDs (births, marriages, deaths), FBI files, and land and tax
records, for instance. The US Bureau of Land Management has a wonderful
series of state and regional sites where they've put old land patent records
online. (This is land that's still owned by somebody, and you can find out
how his/her ancestor acquired 160 acres of prime California land at
$1.25/acre in 1877, for example.)

The USGenWeb project is fantastic, too--the brainchild of a Kentucky
genealogist who died recently. About a decade ago, he envisioned a linked
and ringed genealogical pooling of info. that would involve all 50 states
implementing identically structured centers with enough structural
flexibility to enable each one to play to its strengths and work around its
particular laws and regs. Now each state has not only a statewide GenWeb but
many county and city ones as well. And, unlike the burgeoning Net industry
in the sale of genealogical databases, searches, and guidelines for the many
amateurs doing family searches, everything in the USGenWeb databases is
free, as is everything in its affiliated RootsWeb project, which also has
state, country, and city links, and is unique in making good use of
volunteers for "look-ups" (i.e., of records that aren't online yet) and for
providing their own family trees to a gigantic World Tree now under
construction, but in which one can already do "surname searches" and even
download the sometimes enormous GedCons of a thousand or more ancestral
names people have traced, mapped (to strict specifications), and uploaded.
There are hundreds of websites now where you can do free surname
searches--they're basically databases wholly comprised of names collected
and simply put online, some dedicated to a specific family or extensions
thereof, some international and organized around highly local locales, such
as German and French villages where many Americans have their roots. More
and more of those villages are in fact putting up their own websites geared
toward the special virtual tourist with a genealogical agenda, and these
will often have translation engines right on site (AltaVista has gone global
with its Babelfish translator, for instance).

Well, pardon me for going on at length about all this, but I share your
fascination with the whole phenomenon of surfing and searching, which, I
suspect, is altering the software portions (at least) of my brain!

Cheers,

Candice



on 6/17/01 7:57 AM, Matthew Francis at [log in to unmask]
wrote:

> I've noticed reviews of a book on this subject recently. It was called
> _Marginalia_, I think. Can't remember the author, but it should be easy
> enough to trace on Amazon.
>
> And, to take up Mairead's point, what an astonishing thing the Web, is. I
> never cease to be amazed at how easy it is to trace information one might
> have spent months searching for in libraries. I've taken to searching it for
> the names of people I lost touch with twenty-odd years ago, and sure enough
> I find most of them. So far I haven't got in touch with them, though. It
> seems somehow an intrusion, as if it's actually a necessary process to lose
> some of one's friendships over time. They've been transformed into memories,
> and to revive them again deliberately (of course, such rediscoveries have
> always happened by chance from time to time) would be a shock on both sides.
> But there they all are, swimming about in cyberspace, ready to be fished
> out. It's an uncanny feeling.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Matthew