B12: I know how to access the World Wide Web, are there any web sites that specialize in Italian genealogy or other Italian subjects?

Here is an annotated list of useful Web sites gleaned from PIE during the beginning of 1996. Obviously, no such list can ever be totally complete or totally objective, but this probably hits the ones that the most people have found the most useful for Italian genealogy work. (Sorry, no Italian recipes here -- the list is long enough)

If you know of (or personally maintain) alternate Web sources for similar information (such as various lists on private home pages), it would be helpful if you could contact the page owners and encourage them to contribute to a single source that everyone could link to directly (such as the Italian Genealogy Homepage). Multiple versions of information on the Web often do more harm than good.

Frequent Abbreviations :

• CGI = Common Gateway Interface (mechanism for retrieving from a database)
• DNS = Domain Name Server (finds server named .com/edu/gov/it/net/org...)
• FTP = File Transfer Protocol (technical specs for network transmission)
• HTML = HyperText Markup Language (source code that builds a Web page)
• HTTP = HyperText Transfer Protocol (successor of FTP)
• URL = Uniform Resource Locator (Internet address for a Web page)
• WWW = World Wide Web (page-oriented Internet navigation system)

General Tips:

1. Web sites usually provide direct links to other Web sites on related topics, so casual exploring -- "surfing the net" -- can actually be very productive. The more you familiarize yourself with the particular features of your Web browser program (Netscape, Mosaic, etc.), the more efficiently you will be able to explore.

2. On the other hand, it is easy to get so distracted exploring the Internet that you are no longer seriously researching your family. Be careful not to lose sight of your goals.

3. As with all electronic resources, *BACKUP* your information frequently. Also, be sure to run a virus-checker on anything you copy to your computer. "Here today, gone tomorrow" can be very unfortunate in a research context :-((

4. It is not always straightforward how to access a Web site successfully; sometimes it requires a little creativity:

• Some pages are not available full-time. Keep trying -- at different times of the day, and different days of the week.
• Sometimes, pages cannot be accessed directly, but only indirectly. For example, if you cannot access http://www.xxx.yyy/zzz directly, instead try http://www.xxx.yyy/ and look for a suitable link to select. (This does not always work; similarly named URLs may not be linked at all.)
• Once you reach a Web site you would like to be able to revisit easily, add it to the customized "hotlist" or "bookmarks" for your Web browser. Be sure to keep a *BACKUP* copy of the complete URL addresses somewhere, too. Do not rely on any Web links to be permanent; save the direct addresses. Private pages can change or vanish at any time.

5. Be aware that no single search utility can "search 100% of the Internet,"even though some may claim that distinction. For one thing, many Web sites require passwords or some other form of pre-registration. For another, the explosive growth of the Internet means that the indexing software is constantly struggling to keep up with the thousands and thousands of Web pages and E-mail addresses being added or modified every day.

**DO YOUR PART TO HELP!** When your E-mail address changes, take a few moments to register the change on all the Web pages and databases in which it appears, so that others will know how to contact you. Since no single Web search is complete, it is a good practice to use two or more search utilities independently. In fact, some "compound search engines" are designed to do just that automatically: run several search utilities independently and assemble the results. Don't be a resource hog, though; please try to use these sparingly, thoughtfully, and efficiently. Narrow down your searches as much as possible; too many matches can be as bad as too few.

6. Quality control on the Internet is highly variable. Some common examples:

• Web pages may not be legible for all browser programs. (Netscape, Mosaic, etc.)
• Data may be obsolete. E-mail addresses may no longer be valid. Web pages may no longer contain the search words to which they were indexed.
• Web pages may be chronically unavailable or "under construction."
• Search engines may have different (and often undocumented or counter-intuitive) ways of treating things like two-word surnames (De Giovanni), upper/lower case spellings (giovanni), wildcards (*iovan*), etc.
• It is usually well worth the time and effort to read/download/print the Help/Hints/Instructions file for each Web site, in order to understand its full capabilities -- and its quirks and shortcomings. Most pages also provide an E-mail address (or icon) at the bottom, to which you can direct specific questions or comments. The level of responsiveness ranges from excellent to nonexistent, but it never hurts to try.

Now, without further ado, here are specific Web sites for pursuing Italian genealogy:

http://www.italgen.com/ - Italian Genealogy Homepage well-focused and professional many useful links, including:

http://www.italgen.com - Italian Surname Database (online subset of POINT directory)

http://www.italia.com/epi/city_loc/form.html - Italian Village Locator (not detailed, but very complete, including regional map, CAP postal code and telephone prefix)

http://ftp.cac.psu.edu/~saw/genealogy.html - Genealogy Homepage (extremely wide-ranging)

http://ftp.cac.psu.edu/~saw/FHC/fhc.html - locations of LDS Family History Centers

http://www.saritel.interbusiness.it/pge/LoginPgeEn.html and http://www.saritel.interbusiness.it/cgi-bin/pge/ANONYMOUS/anonymous/sess/02 - Italian Yellow Pages (plagued by chronic error messages) enter category "religione" to list all active churches in a comune

Note: There is still no online Italian residential directory.

http://www.albany.net/allinone/ - well-organized collection of several dozen general search utilities particularly recommended are:

http://www.switchboard.com/ - USA white page directories (telephone, address, zip) wildcard logic works reliably in white pages *ONLY IF* first name is blank -- otherwise, "no matches found" can mean "more than one match found" printing/saving is deliberately made inconvenient for bulk queries

http://www.bigyellow.com/ - USA yellow pages

http://www.xmission.com/~americom/aclookup.html and http://www.555-1212.com/aclookup.html - USA area codes

http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/lookups/lookup_zip+4.html - USA zip codes

http://www.iaf.net/ - Internet Address Finder

http://www.four11.com/another E-mail directory service

http://www.altavista.digital.com/ - search Web or Usenet by word or phrase

http://savvy.cs.colostate.edu:2000/ - query about 20 search engines simultaneously

http://www.infoseek.com/ - very popular general-use search package

http://www.c2.net/~buttle/tel/ - collection of on-line international telephone directories

http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/mums2.html and http://marvel.loc.gov/z3950/mums2.html - Library of Congress author-title search limited hours of availability

http://www.vtourist.com/vt/usa.htm - simple outline map of the lower 48 United States

http://www.census.gov/stat_abstract/profile.html - simple outline map of all 50 states; click to select state/county detail excellent on screen, but color shading makes printouts difficult to read

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/county_outline.html - county outline maps of all 50 states large files are slow to view or print, but very clear and detailed

http://www.cimorelli.com/maps.htm - detailed maps of Italy and regions (from Touring Club Italiano)

http://ragno.ats.it/ and http://www.ats.it/wpages/ - search Italian E-mail addresses and Web sites (Ragno = Italian Spider = WebCrawler) extremely incomplete -- even on the Italian Internet, US search engines are usually much more thorough

http://www.willamette.edu/~tjones/forms/italian.html and http://dictionary.logos.it/query.html - "experimental" translation dictionaries already linked into hundreds of Web sites, but still woefully primitive -- TJones did not know rother=Fratello; Logos did not know Sister=Sorella! so forget these for a while; invest a few lire in a paperback dictionary

http://www.globalink.com/xlate.html - E-mail version of "Barcelona" translation software 500-word documents currently processed free within 24 hours excellent idea, but could not get it to work properly

http://www.cimorelli.com/italasst.htm - John Gerrard's supplemental dictionary for Italian Assistant software (file requires unzipping)

http://www.tju.edu/~johnsto1/geneindx.html - Italian occupations, Italian given names, and their English equivalents new submissions are automatically forwarded to PIE for comments

gopher://unix6.nysed.gov:70/11/research-service - index to New York State Archives info

http://www.csp.it/reti_civiche.html - Italian Civic Networks links to information on dozens of cities in Italy, US, and elsewhere -- history, culture, shields/flags, local news, directories, photos, etc. various mixtures of Italian, English, and other languages

http://www.initaly.com/initaly/ and http://www.lainet.com/initaly/ and http://abruzzolink.nautilus.it/ and http://csi2000.csi.it/~piemonte/ and http://www.sicily.cres.it/ - similar information on the various regions of Italy

http://www.city.net/ - similar information on 2000 cities around the world can be extremely slow

http://www.italyemb.nw.dc.us/italy/bbs/msgs.html - Italian Embassy Homepage (Washington DC) bulletin board for posting messages or queries not clear how productive this will be

http://diemme.diemme.it/italiani/ and http://www.diemme.it/italiani/ - Italians in the World names and brief messages submitted by users, sorted by region of Italy, edited and updated haphazardly by site managers -- not even alphabetized(in other words, authentic Italian disorganization!)

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html - the basic technical guide for producing your own Web pages

http://www.dsi.unimi.it/Users/sadun/cshp.html - an Italian version

http://www.sunysb.edu/cis/ - Center for Italian Studies State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, New York 11794-3358 - Phone: (516) 632-7444