Top Favorites to Get Your Feet Wet With:

• Family Search--   https://www.familysearch.org/ 

Free--The largest Collection of free family history, family tree and genealogy records in the world.  Don't miss other FamilySearch links such as:   Family Search Wiki--https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Main_Page

• Tree Connect: http://recordseek.com/--Get the bookmark tool that will allow you to automatically connect a record to FamilySearch.org
• ($) Ancestry-- http://www.ancestry.com/

Portions of the site are free without a subscription.  The World Library Edition of Ancestry is available at LDS FamilySearch Centers.  To locate a center near you, click this link:   https://www.familysearch.org/locations

• Find a Grave--  (Remember--less information is more likely to produce results)  http://www.findagrave.com/ 
• Also try: Billion Graves-- http://billiongraves.com/
• USGenWeb: http://usgenweb.org/
• World Gen Web--  http://www.worldgenweb.org
• Joe Beine Genealogy Research Guides, Tips and Online Records www.researchguides.net/index.htm
•   Original Wee Monster US Databases:  http://www.germanroots.com/databases.html  
• Google--  http://www.google.com
•  Google Translate-- http://translate.google.com/

It is important to use other search engines also:  

• http://www.preservingtime.org/search-engines.html
•   Internet Archive--  http://www.archive.org/

Digital Library with access to millions of Free digitized books.  MANY old histories and biographies.  Wayback Machine searches an archive of old internet sites.

• Steve Morse--  http://www.stevemorse.org/

• Wikipedia-- http://www.wikipedia.org/  Especially helpful: Use the search terms:  "List of online newspaper archives"