his chronicle of living online will appear on alternate Thursdays.

Mining Ellis Island

If you think you've dug out every scrap of data on your immigrant ancestors from the Ellis Island Web site — as I did after spending several hours on it last spring — you may want to check again. Two genealogy buffs have come up with tools that they say can help find information buried deep within the database.

Stephen Morse was on a mission to find records of his wife's immigrant grandfather, but his first pass at the Ellis Island site was fruitless. Suspecting that the data was there but needed to be sleuthed out, he developed a single Web page that allows a sweep of the database using all possible criteria. The page (home.pacbell.net/spmorse/ellis/ellis.html) enabled him to track down records for the grandfather in question, Jonas Feiner. And when I plugged in my family data, it located a ship's manifest that had eluded me. Mr. Morse estimates that more than 15,000 people have used the page, which is free.

Similarly, Edward Rosenbaum has been researching his family for more than a dozen years and says, "The Ellis Island database let me find aunts, uncles and cousins that I never knew about." But Mr. Rosenbaum, president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Bergen County, N.J., was frustrated with what he considered the inconsistent spelling of surnames on the site. So he wrote a "name permutations" program to offer a greater number of alternative spellings. So far, about 100 people have paid $20 for the program, available at erosenbaum.netfirms
.com/eidb.shtml.

An Ellis Island spokeswoman said that as long as the terms for use of the official site (www.ellisisland.org) were upheld, "we are in favor of anything that helps people trace their family history."

Watch That Link!

Now, thanks to jargon spotters at The Chronicle of Higher Education's site (chronicle.com/free/it/jargon.htm), I know what to call my hovering husband as I type: back-seat mouser. That's an overly helpful onlooker who constantly gives directions about where to point, click and scroll.

Clicking for Dollars

The Hunger Site was one of the first and most popular sites to let Web users donate to charity by looking at online ads. If you clicked on one of the site's banner ads, a cup of rice was donated to the United Nations World Food Program. Nearly $4 million worth of food was raised in that manner.

But the site is no more. Its parent company, Greatergood.com, is a victim of the dot-com downturn, despite having raised $20 million from investors. (Company officials, asked several times by voice mail for comment, did not respond.)

I knew many people who made the Hunger Site their home page. Indeed, by plugging its address into
LinkPopularity.com I found that more than 40,000 other sites link to it. But being well known clearly wasn't enough. Does the failure of the Hunger Site mean this type of charitable giving isn't viable?

Not according to Jennie S. Hwang, chief executive of FreeDonation.com (www.freedonation.com), a charity hub based on a model similar to that of the Hunger Site. She argues that the concept "would not seem invalid today if most Internet businesses followed sound fundamentals."

`Rosebud Is His Sled'

Matt Drudge, the online columnist, may have ruined the viewing experience of many would-be fans of "Planet of the Apes" by revealing the twist at the end, but he would have failed miserably at the Spoilers Game. Diane Patterson, a screenwriter who has posted the game on her site (www.spies.com/~diane /spoilers.html), says it challenges players "to destroy movies for those who haven't seen them in the shortest and pithiest manner."

The best spoilers are one sentence and use pronouns instead of character names when possible (Ms. Patterson argues that naming a character associated with the movie, like Hannibal Lecter for "Silence of the Lambs," takes the fun out of it).

You couldn't get any pithier than the winning spoiler for "The Crying Game": "She's a guy."

A Fetching Idea

If there are more than a couple of sites you check regularly, QuickBrowse (www.quickbrowse.com) will make your day. It's one of a new breed of metabrowsers that combine your favorite sites onto one long page for quick viewing.

You can set up QuickBrowse three ways. The first lets you choose from a list of preselected sites organized by category. The second offers a menu of 16 newspapers. You can even check off specific sections.

The third way is to enter your own list of sites. This page can be generated daily and sent to you via e-mail. I set it to check message boards as well as content sites, and it worked just as well. Another good thing: You don't have to download any software.

Now all I need is a meta-reader who can sift through all this information for me.