Many people search their family and ancestors on the web. And there is a remarkable amount of genealogical information available. As we go further back in time, , most people did not end up in records, perhaps only when they worn born or died. And if they did, most of the papers were thrown away or got lost. For a superficial observer, it would seem that before the world was only populated by celebrities and other remarkable people.
I don't look for my ancestors, but for a part of my research into the history of the Spanish Empire, I needed to look up a whole host of people: the Spanish vice-roys under Habsburg rule (from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth-century). They were all nobles, and before I started, I figured a lot would be known about them. Remarkably enough, they have not been studied very much, even if they were ranking second only after the king. They were officially even his replacement in a kingdom when he was absent. As a group, they have(to my knowledge) never been studied, though there are some studies about viceroys in specific territories (especially the New World). There were many territories of Europe and oversees involved. For Mexico and Peru (the only vice-royalties to the eighteenth centuries), lists of viceroys could easily be found. The same is true for the viceroys of Naples and Sicily (even though Spannish rule there was subject to changes) and for the Netherlands. But there were also vice-royalties in territories of Spain itself.
It proved hard to find these people with traditional, paper, means as many publications were old and had never had any wide-scale distributions. Here, the web came to the rescue, with the growing amount of digitized books (als obscure books) in programs like Google Books. Also, many wikipedia (and other sites) contain revived older paper research. This material needs to be treated with caution, as much of is old and contains mistakes. It is also hard to find, even on the web, because titles vary and there are no standardized terms under which they have made available. Where I wrote viceroyalties, they were not always called exactly that, but also governors or 'landvoogd' in the case of the Habsburg territories in the low countries (some would probably object to my calling them viceroys).
After some searching, I found lists for all viceroyalties, mostly on wikipedias, but also on other sites. The individuals were less easy to find. The most famous have been the subject of biographies, or other historical monographs. New World viceroys were all described in greater or lesser detail. And fortunately they were all nobles of distinguished families, many of whose genealogies have been published in digital form.
Many of these descriptions are to be found on wikipedia. But when you start using the material, there appears to be not one, but many wikipedia. All languages have their own wikipedia. The English language is the biggest, but the Spanish. German, French and Dutch are quite large too. There contents overlap, but are by no means the same. Sometimes there is information about a person in Italian, but not in Spanish or English. Sometimes the German entry about a person is much more detailed and better checked than the English one. For people with a local importance, it is usually advisable to check the wikipedia version of the country concerned (for portuguese viceroy the portuguese, for example). Sometimes, and entry in one language is shorter, but contains useful links or references. Combining wikipedias (and other sources) is necessary for best results.
There is another point that has to be taken into account. Information in all wikipedia entries is very often outdated and contains mistakes. Sometimes these are mistakes taken directly from the old reference works used for compiling the entries. Hardly ever newer insights from historical research have not been taken into account. From an analytical point of view, it is stepping back a few decades. Finding information is often intricate if you have to use full-text search, as vocabularies change and vary and in my case many different languages were involved. Search engines will not search anything different than you typed in and words but also names differ from one language to another. Searching for nobility is further complicated because their names vary and sometimes they were called by there noble title rather than their family name.
For interpretation and context using modern historiography is indispensible. This will be much harder to find on the web than factual information. Even literature guides are hard to find and bibliographies are increasingly considered old-fashioned. Perhaps programs like Google books will give more insight when they include more research, but they are still heavily biased toward works in English and with so many works available you have to know what you are searching for. Journal articles are not included in these programs and it is very hard to judge up which journals Google scholar contains. There is no single source for journal material for the humanities anyway. All solutions and providers are partial, and certainly not accessible in a uniform way. Access may vary with the computer you happen to work on; home access is usually much more restricted than services at work.
In conclusion, in my experience using the web, more specifically Wikipedia, for research into people can be very productive. But, always check your sources and be aware that all information is taken from somewhere else, often literally from old, sometimes very old reference works.
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