• Castle Garden: If your ancestors arrived in New York before Ellis Island opened in 1892, turn to this database on 10 million immigrants who entered through Ellis Island’s predecessor, Castle Garden. Castle Garden opened in 1855, but the records here start in 1830.

• Tribal Pages: This innovative collaboration site hosts family Web sites with more than 175,000 pedigree files, plus a database of names in those family trees. You can keep track of birthdays and other events, and generate charts and reports right from the site. Free sites let you store an unlimited number of names in your tree and up to 50 photos; after that, you can upgrade for a fee.

• Illinois State Archives Online Databases: Illinois has put many indexes online. You can search statewide indexes of marriages (1763 to 1900) and deaths (pre-1916 and 1916 to 1950), plus veterans' records ranging from the War of 1812 to the 1929 Roll of Honor. An index to the Illinois Regional Archives Depositories (called IRAD) will tell you where to go next in search of records on your Prairie State ancestors.

• Access Genealogy: Besides oodles of links, this free portal also serves up census, vital, immigration, cemetery and military records; plus biographies and such Native American essentials as the 1880 Cherokee census and the Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes (aka the Dawes Rolls). They’ve got a nice beginner’s guide, too.
  

• RootsWeb: This venerable volunteer-run site now resides in Ancestry.com’s domain, but don’t worry—it’s still free. It shares some visual elements with Ancestry.com and the page URLs have ancestry in them, but it has kept its friendly feel and remains an ideal jumping-off point for new researchers. Besides a great Getting-Started guide, you’ll find a ton of mailing lists, message boards, family tree files (in the WorldConnect Project) and more.

• Access to Archives: Called A2A for short, this catalog describes historical records in 416 English and Welsh repositories, including local record offices and libraries, universities, museums, and national and special institutions.
  

• Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System: Start your search for Union or Confederate Civil War ancestors in this database of 6.3 million soldiers’ names (names appear twice if soldiers fought for more than one regiment or used a different name) from 44 states and territories. Names link to information about the  regiments and the battles they fought.

• DeadFred: If you're starting from a pile of old photos or you’re looking for lost family pictures, this photo-reunion site is the place to click. Search by surname, and if you find a match, contact the submitter for information. DeadFred's collection encompasses some 14,600 surnames and 76,00 records, and it's reunited 1,227 old photos with families.

• eHistory: We put this free Ohio State University site in our military research category for rich records of conflicts—including the The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. (the OR), battle overviews, Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War, maps and timelines.

• Access Genealogy: Besides oodles of links, this free portal also serves up census, vital, immigration, cemetery and military records; plus biographies and such Native American essentials as the 1880 Cherokee census and the Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes (aka the Dawes Rolls).

You can search by surname, or go to United States Genealogy to browse databases by title.

• Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild: This guild of volunteers has tirelessly transcribed more than 8,000 passenger manifests, many from less-famous ports. Search by surname, captain's name, port of arrival or departure, and ship name.
  

And there's more: The guild’s Compass section offers how-to help for researching immigrants; a new adoption section has advice for adoptees and birth parents who want to reunite with their biological family members.

• Genline: Genline delivers images of 16 million-plus pages of church records (virtually everything available) to your computer. Subscriptions start at about $23 for 20 days. You also can go to the resources section to learn Swedish terms you’ll encounter in your research and get how-to articles.
  

• Digitalarkivet was originally home to 1801, 1865, 1875 and 1900 Norwegian censuses, this national archives site is expanding to also encompass parish records—the most important family research tool in Norway.

Click Database Selector to find databases by county or year, or choose the Search in All the Database link (note this page doesn’t seem to have an English translation, but you can get a serviceable one by pasting the text into Google’s translator and selecting Norwegian as the language to translate from).

• The Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection brings digitized historical maps from around the world straight to your computer screen. They’re sorted by category, so first scroll down and click Historical Maps, then a continent or country. From there, you can choose maps of cities, military maps and maps showing historical eras, territorial growth, populations and more.