Talk to each of your oldest living relatives. Go to libraries with genealogical or historical collections and attend a genealogy society meeting.
Web sites offer searchable databases, free family Web sites, indexes of government records.
More than 4,000 free e-mail lists cover specific ethnic groups, surnames, localities, religions and software programs. Thanks to such cooperative group efforts as RootsWeb and Heritage Quest, Howells reports, there are scanned images of records and reliable indexes of those records.