When I was born in rural western New York, I was welcomed into a family with five living generations. My great-great-grandmother, Helen Johnson Huff, was born 100 years earlier in Prattsburg, New York, and died when I was three months old.

Twenty-five years ago, when I embarked on serious family history research, I began with Great-great-grandma Huff's obituary. From it, I found out where and when she was born, who her parents were, and information about her siblings and descendants. Then I went to the library to look for information about the history of my great-great-grandmother's birthplace. I looked up copies of the U.S. Federal Census for the decades I expected her to be listed. I also checked state census records for the years between the federal censuses and local newspapers for related items on family members. These efforts provided documentation to support stories and oral traditions passed down within my family.

Even in this high-tech age, family history research usually begins with writing down what we know about ourselves and our families, the stories (oral traditions) about aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents. These give us a baseline, a time and place to start our research.

The current national explosion of interest in family history research can be traced back to Alex Haley's 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family and the phenomenally successful TV miniseries that followed. Roots showed that an African American descendant of enslaved ancestors could trace his lineage back to Africa. Millions realized that they, too, could trace their history. Genealogical research was no longer the province of the aristocracy; it became acceptable for all of us to want to know who our ancestors were and how they contributed, or did not contribute, to the development of present-day America. We quickly learned that we all have skeletons and charlatans in our families as well as heroes and heroines.

My interest in genealogy was triggered by a curiosity about my own family's unique history. Mine is one of a group of African American and mixed-race families that had lived in overwhelmingly white rural western New York State for as long as anyone could remember. I wondered when and why this group of African American families had come to this particular area. Why had their descendants stayed for so many generations? Were the rumors of white and/or Native American ancestors true? I now have answers to some of these questions, and I now have an extended family that includes several hundred individuals.

Information technology has created a dramatic increase in the scope and range of resources available to the researcher. In the past, one had to travel to the sources. Today, you have access to more information on your home computer than there was in all of the libraries I visited during my early years of research. If you are among those fascinated by this topic but haven't tapped into the technological resources available, there are several Web sites you might visit.

Do-it-yourself genealogists may want to visit www.Ancestry.com or www.genealogy.com, the two largest commercial sites that provide access to Federal Census records. The Web site ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi provides access to the U.S. Social Security Death Index, a site containing birth and death information on everyone who collected benefits under the system from its beginnings in the 1930s to 2003. Other useful and popular sites include www.familysearch.org, maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and www.Cyndislist.com, the mother of all genealogy Web sites, with links to over 207,000 Web sites in 150 different categories. Family history research has become big business in the United States.

The National Genealogy Society estimates that family history is the second most popular hobby in the country, after gardening: 35 million people in the United States use the Internet to research their family histories. They have found that the current technology creates a wonderful bridge to our personal and collective past. Join them and you may be amazed by what you find.

—Dr. Stanton F. Biddle is the administrative services librarian at Baruch's William and Anita Newman Library. He has been a professor at Baruch College since 1984. In addition to his family history research, he is an active member and past national president of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. His scholarly research has focused on strategic planning in academic libraries and on African Americans in librarianship.