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When you're lollygagging on the Internet, how much time do you spend at a particular Web site? A couple of minutes, or even just a few seconds? With millions of sites competing for your time, it's astonishing to stumble across a site where you willingly linger more than 30 minutes.

There's a genealogy Web site where family historians do more than just linger; they practically take up residence. The site's administrators calculate that most visitors roam their cyber-pages for at least an hour each visit. Others clock in even longer.

What Web site has captured the attention of so many genealogists? The free site operated by the LDS church: www.familysearch.org.

Launched with much fanfare in 1999, this cache of genealogy data and research tools generates over 10 million hits a day. Since its beginnings FamilySearch has had over 15 billion hits.

The numbers border on the unfathomable, and there's no reason why you shouldn't add to the statistics. Here are some of the treasures you'll find when you click your way to FamilySearch.

More than anything, genealogists hunt for hard data on their ancestors. FamilySearch won't disappoint you because there are more than one billion names (yes, that's a 1 followed by nine zeros!) in its online databases.

The home page invites you to simply enter an ancestor's name and let the search begin. I'd recommend getting familiar with the databases first.

To find individual databases and indexes click on the "search" tab at the top of the home page.

FamilySearch offers three census indexes: The 1880 U.S. census, the 1881 British Isles census, and the 1881 Canadian census.

These indexes provide data snapshots of 80 million individuals, and as an added bonus, the U.S. census index links to digital images at Ancestry.com that can be viewed for free.

If your roots are in Mexico or Scandinavia, check out the Vital Records Index. Here you'll find 2 million birth, christening, and marriage records from Mexico. The Mexican records go back as far as 1659.

The Scandinavian database contains more than 4 million birth, christening, and marriage records for Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This database spans more than 300 years.

The Social Security Death Index contains birth and death information for millions of Americans. Most of the deaths listed in this index occurred after 1960.

The International Genealogical Index, the Ancestral File, and the Pedigree Resource File also have millions of vital records. Be cautious, though, when using these databases. Much of the unverified data has been submitted by LDS church members and others interested in family history.

Consider the information in these files clues for further research, not rock-solid facts. Each database has slightly different information, so check all of them for clues about your ancestors.

Next week I'll review some of the other helpful resources at www.familysearch.org.