I think this is a GREAT site to use. It is taking me to a ton of places I never knew existed (but how could we on the internet.. LOL) Just passing it on in hopes it helps others. Michelle The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. - GenealogyPortal.com The Internet trade press is abuzz these days with articles about "Internet portals." Even Wall Street venture capitalists are investing millions in companies that provide Web portals. Now Steve Wood has created a genealogy portal Web page. A portal can loosely be defined as a starting place. It provides quick and easy access to many other Web sites of a particular interest. Portal sites such as Yahoo!, Webcrawler and CompuServe.com provide menus grouped by popular topics such as news, weather, sports, Hollywood entertainment, etc. When you click on one of these, you are quickly taken to pages of that interest. These portals are popular as they are easy-to-use "main menus" for many people. Steve Wood's GenealogyPortal.com is similar in concept. The first thing I noticed is that it has a quick and easy method of searching hundreds of genealogy sites looking for names. I searched for my own surname and found thousands of "hits," too many to manage. I then narrowed the search by specifying my great- great-grandfather's name. GenealogyPortal.com quickly found 91 matches and ranked them as to which were "most probable." A rating of four trees indicated a high probability of a match, three trees was still somewhat probable, etc. Each "hit" gave a small extract from the text of the matching site. All I had to do was click on the text, and I could then look directly at the selected site. GenealogyPortal.com also has lists of Archives and Libraries, Guides to Research, Historical Sites, Primary Records, and Research Supplies, as well as a list of Software and Utilities. This is a good site from which to launch your online searches. Look at: http://www.genealogyportal.com