Finding YOUR ancestors among the countless genealogical resources can be an overwhelming task. Genealogy Today established this online catalog to reduce the time involved in searching multiple databases, and to simplify that task by making the search process more consistent and efficient.

The catalog includes references to hundreds of searchable databases, online transcriptions and GEDcom-based family trees. Each of these offers their own unique challenges - some of which require manual scanning to find matching surnames. You'll be amazed at how much time our registry can save you.

One of the best features is the customizable profile that every visitor can establish for themselves. The profile contains fields commonly used in searching resources, so that once you set one up, matching fields in our specially programmed registry searches are instantly populated with your criteria. Have a brick wall? Just enter as much information on that person as you have into the profile, and then start searching for them.

For searchable databases, we carefully examine the basic and advanced (when available) searches offered by the hosting web site. We don't ever copy their code; instead we create our own versions in the Genealogy Registry, matching common fields to the customizable profiles. We also translate coded criteria (e.g. state abbreviations) into widely accepted standards, making it possible to preserve more of your preferences between searches.

For online transcriptions, we cache the names listed (just like a search engine) and provide our own search capability. Transcriptions are great, but having to scan an entire page (or sometimes multiple pages) can be very time consuming. Using the Genealogy Registry you can search these resources by surname.

And lastly, for GEDcom-based family trees, we cache a copy of the gendex.txt file - an indexed listing of the names in the tree. GEDcom is a format for storing a family tree commonly used by software programs. A popular utility called GED2HTML, developed by Eugene Stark, helps people publish their GEDcom onto a web site, and creates a special index file called gendex.txt. We developed a search engine for this format, making it possible to seek surnames in any of the family trees cataloged into the Genealogy Registry.

The resources in our catalog are organized by type of data, geographic region, and the years covered. You can browse through the catalog by region, by topic or type of resource (i.e. searchable database, transcription or GEDcom). And if you know of a resource that is not already in our catalog, you can suggest it using a simple form.