Genealogy: Getting to Grips with Genealogy Jargon!

Since part of your genealogy research is going to take place on the Internet, it might be good idea to introduce you to a small glossary of the terms and meanings associated with Internet genealogy.

As you know, things are often simplified down to an a few words or letters on the Internet and we as laypersons are supposed to know what they signify. If you are like me, you don't have or don't want to have a clue to the technical side of computing. You want information and you want it now, you don't wish to go trawling!

Hopefully, this glossary will give you a head's up when you go searching on the Internet and wont leave you pulling your hair out! At the very least, you will have a basic understanding when you are confronted with terminology from more experienced net users.

What follows is a basic list of common bits of Internet jargon floating around that is useful to the intrepid genealogists:

Ahnentafel - roughly translated from the German, this is an ancestor table. It is a list of all the known ancestors of a person, along with date and places of births, marriages and deaths.

Database - information organized for storage, search, retrieval or insertion.

GEDCOM - a file that hold all genealogical information for a given set of people.

Download - information or files that you load onto your computer from a source such as the Internet, email, CD etc.

Upload - information or files that you send from your computer to another source

Gen mail list - a list that you can sign up for on many of the online genealogy websites, such as Roots web. Many of these allow you to choose many different lists such as surname or county. They are excellent for posting a query on some ancestor who is elusive to your searches

Search engine - a program that allows you to type in a subject and will bring up websites dealing with your chosen topic. Google and Yahoo are great examples

Web based Genealogy search sites - these are such sites as Rootsweb, Ancestory.com and FamilySearch. They offer a one-stop principle to help people in many subject areas. Some offer links to censuses, military records and family trees that generous users have offered in hopes of helping their fellow genealogist.

Personal websites - many people today have uploaded their family tress to the Web. Often the site owner has gone to some lengths to create a site, with pictures of family members and all kinds of interesting detail. These are not only fun to look at, but you never know when you will find a link to your own family.

Now I realize that this is not very many terms or definitions. But trust me, this is enough to do your head in for the next month. Get on the Internet and explore. Try entering a name on the rootsweb.com site and see if you can link to your family. Try a search engine like Google.com and type in a name and see what you get. You will find the weird, the wacky and the wonderful.

But most of all have fun. You can spend hours trying to hunt down someone, only to end up wanting to bash your head against the wall. Go on the net and do a bit of serious hunting, but also have a nose around just to see what else is out there. You never know what, or who, you might find!

My next article will give you some hints and tips that I personally have found useful in my research.