Just beginning work on a Rockwell line? Hit a brick wall?
The members of the Rockwell Research Circle may be able to help. Drop me
a line at kwrockwell@yahoo.com, and I'll see what we can come up with.
You can also post queries at the guest book on
the Rockwell Family Foundation website, which we regularly check.
Other sites out there:
- Rootsweb, with its vast World Family Tree and various homepages (such as this one).
At Rootsweb, you can also search on
- Ancestry.com, which now wants you to register in advance of seeing your results.
- The Rockwell Family Forum, from Genealogy.com.
Genforum, an old favorite, now requires registration prior to posting a query,
but at least you can still read the archived postings without hassle.
- Rootsweb also has a Rockwell message board
- Family Search, the website of the
LDS Church's Family History Library, accesses its Ancestral File and the
International Genealogical Index (IGI). These files are by their nature, dependent on the contributors
of the records, so they're incomplete (lots of hits for the first few generations, but maybe none
at all in your late-19th century line), and Ancestral File's entries may be filled with errors, so take
listings with a grain of salt, and try to verify them.
But that's true of all such listings on the Web. If something was published 125 years ago and later proven to be incorrect,
the old understanding of the situation may once more rear its ugly head when someone transcribes details from the book into his
or her genealogy program and uploads it onto the Web, oblivious of more current research. That's one of the missions of the
Rockwell Family Foundation and this research circle: to critique the old published Rockwell genealogies and present more likely
scenarios of descent.
A less user-friendly place to hunt is GENDEX, a vast index to GEDCOM files on the Web. It takes a bit of time to get down the
hierarchy to the Rockwells, but there are a lot of listings. As always, though, beware of errors and try to verify posted data.