Online genealogy research in Europe has made rapid advancements in recent years, with hundreds of documents and databases being placed on the Internet by local governments and various organizations. Vital records from the Netherlands, passenger records from Germany, and civil and parish registers from France are all available online once you learn where to look.

Ferret Out Family History in France

The French approach family history with a passion, which you'll soon find evident as you start to familiarize yourself with the many available genealogy projects and databases for this country. The records are fairly well preserved, despite several wars and much social upheaval, and date back well into the sixteenth century. The biggest drawback to French genealogy on the Internet is that most of the databases, records, and websites are only available in French. Don't let this scare you away, however. With a good French genealogy word list and the help of online translation tools you'll soon be able to navigate your way around French records.

You'll also want to familiarize yourself with the geopolitical divisions in France. Instead of counties, you'll find France broken up into régions (similar to our states) and départements (similar to our counties). Within each département, you'll find cities, towns, and villages, called les mairies. Archives are generally found at the département level, while local records are maintained by each parish and mairie. Départements in France are each assigned a number, so you'll need to learn both the name and number of the département to access appropriate records.

A good place to begin your research into French ancestry is GeneaNet (www.geneanet.org), a genealogy community for publishing and sharing family trees, connecting with other researchers, and locating records. While the site operates as a worldwide genealogy database, the primary focus is still on French ancestry. Because the site is available in English and several other languages in addition to French, it offers an easy introduction to French genealogy research. Search by surname and/or village to help locate databases that may contain information on your family, and to connect with other genealogists who are researching your surname.

Another good gateway site to French genealogy is the FranceGenWeb (www.francegenweb.org) portal. Much of the site is presented in French, although some portions can also be found in English. Use FranceGenWeb as a gateway to find online databases and records, connect with fellow researchers, and locate the départemental GenWebsites. The Historical Databases at FamilySearch.org also include a number of offerings for France, from births, baptisms, and marriages to Protestant church records.

When it comes to records of interest to family historians, France boasts an excellent system of civil registration records dating back to September 1792. Prior to that time, Catholic parish registers (registres paroissiaux) record baptisms, marriages, and funerals in much of France. The earliest parish registers date back to 1334, although the majority of surviving records date from the mid-1600s. These civil and parish records are being made available online, primarily on the websites of the various départemental archives, at a rapid rate. The French census, conducted once every five years beginning in 1836, is another useful record for researching French ancestors. These census records aren't indexed, which makes it hard to locate your ancestors in larger cities, but with patience they can provide you with a great deal of information about your family. Check the website of the départemental archive to see if they offer digitized images of their census records (recensements de population).

Seek Your Ancestry in Italy

There is no central repository for most Italian genealogical records, so the first step in researching Italian ancestors is to identify the town (comune) or municipality (municipio) where they lived. Civil registration was instituted in Italy in 1804, although the Napoleonic-era records are very inconsistent. Once Italy became unified as a country in 1860, civil registration again became a priority of the Italian government. The majority of these records of birth (atti di nascita), marriage (atti di matrimonio), and death (atti di morte) begin in 1866 and continue to the present day. As in France, the predominant religion of Italy is Roman Catholic, so Catholic parish records provide another excellent resources for vital records — baptisms (atti di battesimo), marriages (atti di matrimonio), and burials (atti di sepoltura). The majority date back to 1563, although some church records begin as early as the 1300s.

There are not a lot of records for Italy available online. You can find transcriptions of selected Italian civil records at Transcribed Vital Records of Italian Towns (www.sersale.org/comunes.htm). As with other countries around the world, Italy Gen Web (www.italywgw.org) offers a good resource for Italian genealogy, with online archives and records, how-to guides, and contact information for fellow researchers. Once again, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) is leading the pack, with more than a million combined birth, baptism, marriage, and burial records from Italy, plus civil and municipal records, plus Catholic church records.

Search for Roots in Scandinavia

The Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland offer a wider variety of online genealogical records than most people expect. As with most European countries, the key to Scandinavian genealogy is in knowing the name of your ancestor's hometown or parish. This region's GenWeb sites, accessed through CenEuroGenWeb (www.rootsweb.com/~ceneurgw), offer good introductory information on the available records of interest to genealogists, as well as forums for connecting with other researchers.

A good online source for Scandinavian vital records is the free Family-Search historical records collection. Click on All Collections from the main FamilySearch page (www.familysearch.org), and then Europe in the left hand navigation bar to access vital records from Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Iceland.

The Norwegian Historical Data Centre at the University of Tromsø (www.rhd.uit.no/indexeng.html) is working to computerize many of the historical records of Norway. The site offers free access to the complete Norwegian census of 1865 and 1900, and digitization of the 1875 census is under way. This source also offers access to selected parish registers and other genealogical sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Sweden, the best site for online genealogy research is Genline (www.genline.com), where you can access digitized images of original Swedish parish registers on a subscription basis. The site is available in English, so you can easily identify which parish registers are available before plunking down money for a subscription. You can also buy a twenty-four-hour demo subscription for a reasonable price.

Swedish church records are also available online, again for a fee, from the Swedish National Archives (www.svar.ra.se). This site also offers the complete 1880, 1890, and 1900 censuses of Sweden, plus death records and other databases of interest. Look for a link at the top of the home page to an English version of the site.

The online database of the DIS Computer Genealogy Society of Sweden (www.dis.se) contains more than 22.2 million records of Swedes born before 1905 submitted by members. Searches of this database are free, but only members can access the full details. This site also offers an English-language version.

In Denmark, the Danish State Archives (www.sa.dk) features a number of online databases including a probate index, some census records, and the Danish Demographic Database (www.ddd.dda.dk/ddd_en.htm). Look for an English link on the site home page. The site also includes a link to the Danish Emigration Archives (www.emiarch.dk), where you can search a database of emigration lists compiled by the Copenhagen Police from 1869 to 1940 (the database only includes the years up to 1908). These lists give the last name, last residence, age, year of emigration, and first destination of almost 400,000 emigrants from Denmark. Don't miss the linked collection of online church books (www.sa.dk/ao/Kirkeboeger/default.aspx).

As you might expect in such a remote country, almost every member of the 300,000 population of Iceland is related to one another. You can check this claim out for yourself at Islendingabok (www.islendingabok.is). Meaning “Book of Icelanders,” the database includes Icelandic family trees and genealogies going back for more than 400 years, covering the roughly 720,000 individuals who were born in Iceland at some point in time. Unfortunately, only Icelanders are allowed access to this database.

Dig Deep for Your German Roots

Many genealogists believe that it can be harder to trace your roots in Germany than in any other European country because of changing boundaries and the destruction of records during the two world wars. Germany as it is known today wasn't even established until 1870, and German descent is no guarantee that your roots reach back to Germany at all. Instead you may find them in Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, or Lithuania. Even small portions of Belgium, Denmark, and France were obtained from German territory in 1919.

That being said, there are several good sources of German genealogical information available online. Genealogy.net (www.genealogienetz.de) sponsors a variety of mailing lists, lists German genealogical societies, and links to a number of helpful databases. Some portions of the site are only available in German. Bremen Passenger Lists (www.schiffslisten.de) offers a searchable database of passenger departure records from Bremen for the years 1920 to 1939. All surviving records from this time period — 2,851 out of 4,420 lists — have been transcribed and made available online by the genealogical society Die Maus.

For further research links to German genealogy on the Internet, check out the GermanRoots website (www.germanroots.com) maintained by genealogist Joe Beine. It includes a comprehensive list of links to online genealogy records, books, and other resources, as well as a basic research guide for German genealogy.

Explore Your Eastern and Central European Heritage

For most of the remaining European countries, access to online records is a bit limited. The Internet still comes in handy for research in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, however. Online you can find a wealth of information on the changing political and geographical boundaries of the region, as well as maps, historical documents, and opportunities for connecting with other people researching your surnames.

Begin your search at the site of the Federation of East European Family History Societies (FEEHS) (www.feefhs.org), which is geared toward assisting North Americans in tracing their ancestry back to a European homeland. The site offers links to participating member societies, maps, and helpful online databases for research in Eastern Europe. It also includes a useful collection of ethnic, religious, and national cross-indexes. Another excellent starting point is the EastEuropeGenWeb Project (www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~easeurgw) where you can access queries, family histories, and source records, as well as connect to the country GenWebsites, from Albania to Yugoslavia. For the countries of Central Europe, you'll find many of the same resources at CenEuroGenWeb (www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ceneurgw).

If you have the name of the town or village in Central or Eastern Europe where your ancestors originated, ShtetlSeeker (www.jewishgen.org/Communities/LocTown.asp) can help you determine its present-day location.

Moving on to country-specific databases and resources, the Polish Records Transcription Project (www.rootsweb.com/~polwgw/transcribe.html) at PolandGenWeb offers access to birth, marriage, and death records for many towns in Poland. The PolandGenWeb archives also include links to transcriptions of a few Polish cemeteries and other helpful information. Additional records for Polish genealogy research, including maps, gazetteers, obituary indexes, and cemetery listings can be accessed at PolishRoots (www.polishroots.com). While there, check out the popular SurnameSearch registry, where you can register the surname you are researching and access a variety of surname databases.

For individuals with roots in what was Czechoslovakia prior to 1993 and is now Slovakia or the Czech Republic, It's All Relative (www.iarelative.com) includes a great deal of information on surnames, places, and databases to help you search your Czech, Bohemian, Moravian, Slovak, Lemko, or Carpatho-Rusyn family history. Other helpful sites for this area of Eastern Europe include the Carpatho-Rusyn Genealogy website (www.rusyn.com), The Carpathian Connection (www.tccweb.org), and Cyndi's List (www.cyndislist.com/czech.htm), which offers links to hundreds of additional resources for researching ancestors from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

A collection of several hundred small databases and records useful for researching ancestry in the Eastern and Central European countries of Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine is available for searching at the subscription-based WorldVitalRecords (www.worldvitalrecords.com) site. There are also hundreds of thousands of free genealogy records available for Eastern and Central European countries online at Family Search, including vital and other records from the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Austria, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

Swiss family history is best begun at Swiss Genealogy on the Internet (www.swissgenealogie.ch) where you can find an introduction to researching Swiss ancestors, the Register of Swiss Surnames, and links to websites about Swiss families. Another useful site is Swiss Roots (www.swissroots.org), which serves as a gateway for Americans of Swiss descent looking to discover their ancestors. Here you can access a small handful of useful databases, learn a little about Swiss history and culture, and read about some famous Americans of Swiss descent.