• CompuServe's Genealogy Forum (Go Roots) is the most active of the Online Services. The Roots Forum is broken down into sections, one of which (section 6) is devoted to Canadian Genealogy. On this forum you will find representation for the ACGL in Manchester, as well as numerous commercial sources of information about French-surname genealogy and a horde of researchers like yourself who are anxious to share their expertise. CompuServe also has the rather deceptively-named Genealogy Support Forum (Go Gensup), which has separate sections for commercial vendors of genealogical products. The New England Historic Genealogical Society has its own section on the Genealogy Support Forum.

  One of the big advantages to CompuServe over the other online services is the ability to read and reply to messages offline, with some outstanding products available, notably OzCIS and OzWIN. This saves a lot of money.

• GEnie has a Genealogy Roundtable that is not as active as CompuServe's, but it is broken down into several Topics that would be extremely helpful, if only there were enough users to make them useful, including Acadian, French-Canadian, Nova Scotia, and Quebec Topics. In addition, you may open a topic yourself if you feel you have a subject others would wish to discuss. Finally, one big advantage of GEnie is that old messages do not disappear-- they are archived and you may download them all, if you can afford the download time and have disk space. The last time I checked, there were French-Canadian genealogy messages dating all the way back to 1990. If you can afford 2 On-line Services, then you should definitely take a look at GEnie.

• AOL also has a Genealogy section, as does Prodigy. While I don't recommend either of these as the first choice for genealogists, if you already have either service for other reasons, then of course you will want to use their resources for genealogy as well.

• There are increasing numbers of indexing services on the Web. If you haven't done so already, take a look at one or more of the three largest: Webcrawler, Yahoo or Alta Vista. New genealogy sites are popping up all the time, and established ones are adding new pages.

  French-Canadian Sites

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) home page can be accessed at http://www.nehgs.org. There's a calendar of NEHGS events, on-line Circulating Library catalog and request form, etc. plus links to places like the Public Record Office of England and Wales, Nat'l. Archives of Canada, Ireland, U.S., Library of Congress, NGS, and more.

• Denis Beauregard's Web page on French-surname genealogy, Francêtres, at http://www.cam.org/~beaur/gen/welcome.htm has a wealth of information including a page of Family Experts, where you may find someone who specializes in a family name that is giving you a problem. You can then contact these experts by e-mail for help with your problems. They will expect you, in exchange, to give them the information you have on the family that they may not yet have. That's one of the ways we increase the amount of information available for sharing. Denis also has a directory of Web sites on French surname genealogy.

• The Genealogical Association of Nova Scotia (GANS) has just recently put its "Surname Interest" list from its membership into a searchable file on its WWW page. You type in a Nova Scotia surname and it returns the names and addresses (EMail address also, if there is one) for each member who is researching that name. You can find the GANS page at: http://www.ccn.cs.dal.ca/Recreation/GANS/gans_homepage.html. Other pages at this site have information on the society, its journal, available publications, and other online Associations.

• The American French Genealogical Society (AFGS) in Woonsocket, RI is at http://ids.net/~riwriter/afgshome.html. Although they don't have any genealogical information available online, they do list their hours and services, available publications, and other genealogical sites, plus a copy of the current issue of their journal.

• Yvon Cyr's Acadian Genealogy page lists 800 genealogy pages. Although most of these are not Acadian, he does separate out the Acadian resources and list them first. Jump to Yvon's page Another of Yvon's pages, called Tidbits, includes a list of surname experts.

• The Cajun Clickers Genealogy SIG has a Surname Index and they post queries. They're at http://www.intersurf.com/~cars/.

• But that's not all! You also get the Society of Acadian Descendants (S*A*D), at http://www.the-spa.com/sad/.

• There are newsgroups on the Usenet that relate to French-surname genealogy.

• If you have no Usenet access, the newsgroups can be read by subscribing to a Mail List. GEN-FF-L (mostly in French) and GEN-FR-L (mostly in English) are now being administered by Apple. In my experience, GEN-FF-L has many more messages than GEN-FR-L. Be prepared for most of the messages to be in French. To subscribe, send an e-mail to LISTSERV@mail.eworld.com and the body of your message should be one line: SUBSCRIBE GEN-FR-L

• The ROOTS-L mail-list is for general genalogy, including French-Canadian. To subscribe, send an e-mail to ROOTS-L-REQUEST@rootsweb.com and include the one-line message: SUBSCRIBE ROOTS-L

• To send messages to be included in the mail list, use the address: ROOTS-L@rootsweb.com.

• The Roots Surname List (RSL) is a list of surnames (about 48,000 in June of 1995) with associated dates and locations. Genealogists are welcome to submit the surnames that they are researching for inclusion in the RSL if they are willing to share their data with others. Enough identifying information about dates and locations should be provided so that others can decide whether a link with their own lines is possible or probable. You needn't be on the verge of writing the definitive genealogy for the family in question.

  If you see a surname listed that interests you, contact the person who submitted the surname.

  To obtain a copy of the full RSL from the listserver, the first step is to send e-mail to ROOTS-L-REQUEST@genealogy.org with the one-line message (not in the subject line):

  GET FAMILY INDEX

  You will receive by e-mail the list of the names of the various files comprising the current RSL.

  What, you only want to look up Humperdinck and don't want to FTP megs and megs of data to do so? Well, for the faint of heart, or the scarce of disk space, here is an alternative-- The RSL Web Page.

  and you can query the RSL for individual surnames, click on the submitter's nametag to be shown the submitter's contact information, etc.

• Fidonet has a section named genealogy.cdn for Canadian genealogy.

• The Society of Acadian Descendants maintains a bulletin board that includes access to FidoNet, NGS and IGA. BBS @ (413) 732-0884.

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Last Updated: Tuesday, December 24, 1996