It probably didn't take you very long time before you realized that the net offers a plethora of reference resources online -- what with online phone books, newspapers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on, the Internet has a lot of reference sources available freely to online netizens.

You are probably even aware of many of the genealogy-specific reference sites; many commercial sites offer a limited number of free samples of their products or services; such genealogy "freebies" can be very useful to genealogists who try to pick up a few clues as to where to search next. But you may not be aware of just how many resources can be used by genealogists!

For the purpose of this lesson, I'll divide online reference sites into two general camps: strictly genealogy-related, and general reference sites. The term "reference site" here means those web sites which provide some sort of information which is not considered genealogical data (names, family structure, etc.) but which can be useful to researchers.