With Wikis and Other Forms of Group Research, Family Historians Are Making Surprising Connections.

Wikis, social-networking sites, search engines and online courses are changing genealogy from a loner’s hobby to a social butterfly’s field day. New tools and expansive digital archives, including many with images of original documents, are helping newbies research like pros. Some companies enable users to piggyback onto existing research from the moment they sign up. Others connect several users with similar interests for larger cooperative projects. Users, meanwhile, eager to dig deeper, are often quick to cast aside doubts about authenticity and embrace the instant results. Digital access is fueling the explosion in interest in family roots, says Cliff Shaw, who founded the genealogy-themed search engine Mocavo.com last year. It uses an algorithm that provides ancestry-centric results that may not show up in a Google search. When a user types in a keyword, such as a surname or a place name, Mocavo searches genealogy Web forums, websites and old discussion threads that rarely pop up in regular searches but can be useful for genealogists looking for clues.

Ancestry.com, based in Provo, Utah, is the largest genealogy website, offering access to more than 7 billion records. Directly or indirectly, it is the reason so much genealogy information has become accessible online. “There was a giant digitization wave that Ancestry brought on, and we realized that there is an enormous amount of data that is now made searchable,” Mr. Shaw says. Even seemingly random databases, like “Names of Foreigners Who Took the Oath of Allegiance to the Province and State of Pennsylvania, 1727 to 1775,” are available on Ancestry.com, in some cases behind a pay wall. Is genealogy information found online true? Verifying results online is difficult. Catherine Auvil says she often has doubts about the authenticity of some of the sources. “I think about it all the time,” says the 50-year-old photographer and family historian. “I don’t want to lead anyone astray, especially my own family.” On Ancestry.com, many records were created when the subjects were still alive and so are likely to be accurate. Images of original written documents help confirm findings. Still, users are encouraged to confirm information using multiple sources, says Anastasia Harman lead family historian at Ancestry.com.

It’s exciting to find a connection to a historical celebrity like Marie Antoinette or Jane Austen, says Noah Tutak, chief executive of Geni—and it’s also a fairly common occurrence. “If you go back far enough, you’re probably connected to everyone you know,” he says. Ms. Persing found her famous relatives by merging her Geni profile with more-developed profiles and then scanning down to her alleged 25th great-grandfather on her father’s side. The site’s users self-correct data by flagging discrepancies and inaccuracies, and they solve disagreements by presenting evidence like birth records. Ms. Auvil turned her genealogy obsession into a group history project. She did a Google Books search of an ancestor, Mathias Harman, and found him in a 1910 tome, “The Founding of Harman’s Station.” There, she learned that she is a descendant of the so-called long hunters, 18th-century explorers who went on extended expeditions to the American frontier in present-day Kentucky and Tennessee.

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