Miriam: Thanks for starting this forum, I have found many good ones I am going to try!
One of my favorite spot that I haven't heard mention is the Social Security Death Index. Use this http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ or just simply put in Social Security Death Index in your favorite search engine.
I use this when I want to find out a birth date, because I only have a death date or in reverse, Also It tells where they passed including the city, county, state. Not everyone is in the list. If you have a person in your tree and you are wondering if they are still with us, use this search.
Thanks again everyone for all the good ideas, it sure helps with the search!
I especially like the SSDI as well as the other databases at RootsWeb because you can put a Post-em (electronic sticky note) on the names of your relatives and ancestors...connecting you with others who are researching the same names!
Howdy Miriam! I think the work the Gals from LowCountry Africana & AfriQuest are doing is AMAZING! Both are great repositories of invaluable slave data. I am also enjoying the Digital Library of Georgia! I found 3 historical family related images in one visit!:-)
Thank you to everybody who posted links. I will be checking out quite a few of them.
Here are a few good ones if you are doing research in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Genealogy index has an index of pre-1907 birth, marriage and death records. Some times you need to be creative with the names. I have also discovered you can put in partial names and it will give you results that start with those letters. If you are looking for Marie Hoehne, you can put in Mar Hoeh and it will give you all Mary, Marie, Martin etc. who's last name began with those letters. This helps with old spellings.
I've been inspired by this whole thread, and created a site of Free Genealogy Tools. I'm starting with the ones I use myself and know best. But I certainly plan to include some of great resources that folks have listed here.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the site, and suggestions for other resources to add.
I just signed up for this site a few days ago, so I am way behind most of you. However, here is a site that I have found very useful in researching death and marriage records for ancestors from New York City. It is the Italian Genealogy Group - but don't be mislead by the name - all of my ancestors were Irish. I have volunteered to do transcriptions for this group on a couple of occasions.
This is a site that I maintain, although mostly for Michigan there are links for Arkansas, Ohio, Indiana and more. I try my best to keep all of them "FREE". Michigan Genealogy Sites Wanted to thank everyone for sharing what they had found also.