The aim of GENUKI is to serve as a large virtual reference library of genealogical information that is of particular relevance to the UK & Ireland. It is a free service, organised in co-operation with the FFHS and a number of its member societies, using computer resources that are kindly provided by various universities and now increasingly by individuals. Its front page can be found at the Web address: http://www.genuki.org.uk/

The principal means of structuring the Information Service is, in the main, a four-level hierarchy corresponding to locality. The top level holds information related to the UK & Ireland as a whole. The next level information specific to England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man. The third level of the hierarchy holds information of relevance to particular counties, the fourth level to parishes (or multi-parish towns), etc., within such counties. At each of the levels information is organised by subject.

The information that is provided in GENUKI mainly relates to primary historical material, rather than that resulting from genealogists' personal research, such as GEDCOM files. (Its role is therefore very different from Internet-based services such as GenServ, the Roots Surname List, and the soc.genealogy.surnames newsgroup that genealogists can use to find others researching the same family, and to exchange their research results.) Thus GENUKI contains and provides links to information about what primary material is available, and also a growing collection of indexes and transcriptions, and of digital images, of such material.

The coverage of the different counties still varies considerably, depending on whether the relevant family history societies, and/or individual volunteers with appropriate specialist knowledge, have yet become actively involved. In the case of some counties, GENUKI already has been developed to the stage of having information about each and every parish. In addition it is possible to provide many links to material that can be found elsewhere on the Web; the GENUKI System is almost as valuable for the links it provides to information elsewhere as for the information that has been specially gathered and placed on one of its server machines. In fact, the admittedly ambitious aim is to provide copies of, or links to, all the information of direct relevance to genealogy in the UK & Ireland that is available on-line anywhere. All this depends on volunteer effort so anyone who can help in any way are warmly invited to contact GENUKI.

In particular, any who have their own allocation of Web space, are urged not just to use it to publish their own family tree. Rather, it is suggested that they use at least some of this Web space to make such detailed knowledge of particular topics and localities as they have gathered through their researches, and any general indexes and transcriptions they have compiled, available to their fellow genealogists via GENUKI. It should be noted that the work involved is not solely that of transcribing or scanning information, and editing it for the Web, but also that of obtaining any necessary permissions from transcribers, copyright owners, etc.. By means of the Internet (in particular e-mail and the Web) a family history society can help members (and potential new members) of the society to gain much more benefit from membership, even if they do not have the good fortune to live near enough to be able to take full advantage of the society's library and meetings. Equally importantly, it also makes it much more practicable for such members to become actively involved in the work of the society, for example by taking part in indexing and transcription projects.

Most of the FFHS member societies, covering various regions of the British Isles, now have Web pages that are available via GENUKI. It is hardly surprising that many forward-looking librarians and archivists are actively planning to provide public access to their collections, and their professional services, via the Internet. Indeed, the PRO, the British Library, many university libraries, and several record offices already have their own Web server.

It is felt that, particularly through the activities of libraries and archives, the impact of the Internet on the practice of genealogy will be much more dramatic and rapid than, for example, that of microfilm - which first came into use in some libraries as far back as the 1930s. There are already very large bodies of transcribed historical material and growing numbers of scanned digital images on the Internet. Indeed, continued advances in the storage and transmission of digital information make it extremely likely that such digital imaging will in the end largely replace microfilming (just as CDs have replaced long-playing records, and digital cameras are starting to replace conventional cameras), though it is expected much material will remain on microfilm or microfiche, just as much material still has yet to be microfilmed.

The growing availability of scanned digital images is particularly exciting, for example the on-line digital image of the Magna Carta from the British Library. Starting with a picture which shows the entire document, one can select part of the image, and click on it, so as to have the currently visible image replaced by a 4-times magnified version of that part. This process can be repeated until one has zeroed in on just a few highly magnified letters. Perhaps the best example at present, from a genealogist's point of view, of an on-line archive is a Web server in the USA devoted to the history of the Civil War. This provides a very large collection of high-definition maps, pictures and digital images of original documents, plus transcriptions of these documents, plus a search service by means of which one can search the text of these documents for particular surnames. One looks forward to the day when major archives on this side of the Atlantic provide similar Internet access to their holdings.

Having made all these positive statements about the use of the Internet for genealogy, it is only fair to look at the other side of the coin. Experienced genealogists rightly complain that Internet users, who are new to genealogy, often naively assume that they can do all their researching via the Internet, or even expect to find that this research has already been done, and that a list of their ancestors is theirs for the asking. The Internet is not making books and paper records instantly obsolete. Microfilm and microfiche collections remain of great value and conversing with people face to face is normally better than communicating with them solely via e-mail or an electronic bulletin board.

However, the Internet is already an extremely valuable additional tool for individual genealogists. The Internet is especially useful to those who live far from any major libraries or archives, not least for the great amount of expert (and inexpert!) free advice and help they can and do receive from other genealogists via the Internet. The writer hosts via his own Internet Service Provider a number of pages which relate specifically to the old counties of Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. The provision of information is far from complete but a typical parish would have a page or pages describing where the parish is located as well as an explanation of its name. Following on from this is an extract from Lewis’s Topographical Directory of 1840 describing the parish as it then was.

Other headings include population totals from 1801 to 1891, details of Nonconformist Chapels and associated records, the extent of the Parish Register and Bishops Transcripts, any copies of Baptisms Marriages and Burials available, as well as any other published material about the parish which the author has managed to locate. For example the page for the Parish of Ambleston in Pembrokeshire details those properties which feature in Historic Houses of Pembrokeshire & their families by Major Francis Jones and also notes the Hearths listing in 1670 from the Historical Society of West Wales Historical Records series by Francis Green. In addition there are index pages for the three counties providing bibliographical information on a county basis, details of records offices, links to mailing lists and so on.