Building a Research Toolbox

By Per Erik Strandberg sv:User:PER9000 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Whether you're aware of it or not, you have been building a research toolbox over time. The 200 pages you have saved in your bookmarks and used whenever you're researching, they're all tools for your toolbox. Even though I've been bookmarking my tools for several years now and have some that I refer to pretty much daily, I've never actually sat down and put them all together in an organized manner for my toolbox.

Today that changed. You may have noticed that there's a new tab beneath the header called My Research Toolbox. I have been working all morning going through my bookmarks and organizing them.

Each state has their own section. At the moment, anything that didn't fit under one of my states is in the miscellaneous section. My plan is to further narrow these down to make finding the one I need easier. To make it easier to find what is being looked for, I've added descriptions to each linked site.

The links in my research toolbox at this point are just a few of the many I use in my family research. It is my hope that they will help other genealogists and family historians as well.