Q&A: Ancestry???
Question by Love: Ancestry???
Please help! I am trying to find the ancestry for my family. I wont give out names but If someone can give me a website or more to help me try and find it then that will help. Plus! I don’t want a fee. I just want to look it up. That would be great. Thanks!
Best answer:
Answer by bluebell
Do a google or yahoo search for xxxx (your surname) Genealogy. Lots of related sites will come up
you could also try (http://www.worldgenweb.org) and the mormon church (latter day saints) have good checkable info too
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
6 Comments
Be glad to help you but it’s not likely that you will find your family tree already done online unless someone is working it.
What you really need to do is start with yourself and work backward. Documenting with birth, death, marriage certificates, obits and cemetery records.
Now two free websites are rootsweb.com and familysearch.org. Again unless someone is working your family you won’t find much if anything. If you do find something contact the submitter and request documentation. If they don’t have it don’t believe it.
Check your local library’s homepage and see if they subscribe to heritagequest and ancestry. If they do you can use heritagequest on your home computer with your library card. Ancestry will have to be used at the library.
Then make a visit to your local LDS Center. They have tons of stuff and yes you will have to pay to use some of it. Nothing is for free in this hobby.
I would suggest that you get a book called unpuzzling your past by Emily Croom. It walks you thru step by step and is well worth the $ 20.
Good luck in your quest
babynames.com actually has a ton on where names are from
good luck
I got some free information from ancestry.com, but most of the good stuff you have to pay for.
Call your local library and see if they offer either Ancestry.com or HeritageQuest to their patrons. If they do, then you can use their subscriptions to get the best sites available for completely free.
You don’t mention which nationalities you need to research, so we can’t get in more detail on the European sites. But places like Genlias, Genline and Rootsweb will also be invaluable in many people’s research.
Okay, we get a lot of questions like this. Apparently the word is out that you can find your family tree on the web. Someone knows someone who did. However, if Someone Who Did did not verify what they found, they probably have some good stuff and some junk.
You probably won’t find your complete family tree but you might find some of your family lines. However, you must be very very careful about taking as fact everything you see in family trees on any website, free or paid. Most of the information is not documented. The information is submitted by folks like us. You might see the different information on the same person from different submitters. Then you will see the same information over and over by different submitters on the same person without documentation. Unfortunately, there is a lot of copying being done without it being verified.
Use the information as clues as to where to get the documentation not as fact.
Your public library might have a subscription to Ancestry.Com which has lots of records. They have all the U. S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 is not available to the public yet. They have U. K. censuses also.
Now even on Ancestry.Com don’t take as fact everything you see in family trees that have been submitted. There are errors. They have 3 programs. Ancestry World Tree is their oldest and largest. One World Tree which is a complete mess. Public Family Trees which I am now finding is a joy to work with.
Also, call your nearest Latter Day Saints(Mormon) Church and find out if they have a Family History Center. They have records on people all over the world, not just Mormons. In Salt Lake City, they have the world’s largest genealogical collection.
Their Family History Centers can order microfilm for you to view for a nominal fee.
They don’t bring up their religion and they won’t send their nice looking missionaries by to ring your doorbell.
Also, if you haven’t, get as much information from living family members are possible, particularly your senior members. Tape them if they will let you. It might turn out they are confused on some things but what might seem to be insignificant ramblings and story telling might turn out later to be extremely important. Us old folks like to talk about “old timey.”
Cyndi’s list has a lot of websites and some you might find useful.
Good Luck!
People ask questions like yours 3 – 14 times a day here. No one ever reads the resolved questions. They just ask the same question again and again. The top 10 contributors* all have standard answers we paste. We paste them again and again. It’s OK. Just don’t get upset, like some idiot did last week, that we paste. You get a better answer, we don’t get finger cramps.
I second everything in the long answers from the regulars, especially talking to your older family members. No birth, death or marriage record is going to tell you about the time in 1934 when your newly-wed great-grandparents made Christmas ornaments out of tin foil because they was all they could afford, or the party they threw when great uncle George came home from the Korean War with four Migs stenciled on the back of his leather flying jacket.
Here is my standard answer:
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There are over 500,000 free sites devoted to genealogy on the Internet.
Researching your family tree is about as difficult as writing a term paper in a high school History class. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, but it isn’t as easy as looking up the capital of Peru. If your great-aunt has already done it and posted her line on the Internet, you might find a line from your (dead) great grandfather all the way back to Charlemagne tonight, without any work.
If not, you will have to do the work yourself. Most teens don’t want to spend the time. If you are interested, read on.
These are large and free. Many of them, however, have subtle ads for Ancestry.com in them – ads that ask for a name, then offer a trial subscription. Watch out for those advertisements.
http://www.cyndislist.com/
(240,000+ links, all cross-indexed. If you want Welsh or Pennsylvania Dutch or Oregon or any other region, ethnic group or surname, chances are she has links for it.)
The LDS site and the RWWC here would be the places to look for Great Aunt Matilda’s research. Don’t enter everything; just name and approximate birth year.
http://www.familysearch.com
(Mormon’s mega-site. Click on “Search”, to start with, or “Advanced Search”)
Roots Web
http://www.rootsweb.com
and in particular,
http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi
(Roots Web World Connect; 500,000,000+ entries, of varying quality)
Ancestry.com
http://www.ancestry.com/
(which has free pages and FEE pages – so watch out)
and, in particular,
http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/default.aspx?ln=
Surname meanings and origins
http://www.tedpack.org/begingen.html
My own site: “How to Begin”
United States only:
http://www.usgenweb.net/
(Subdivided into state sites, which all have county sites.)
(The Canadians have Canadian Gen Web, by province)
http://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi
(Social Security Death index – click on “Advanced”. You may find your grandparents.)
http://find.person.superpages.com/
(US Phone book, for looking up distant cousins)
United Kingdom Only:
http://www.genuki.org.uk/
(Biggest site for United Kingdom & Ireland)
http://www.freebmd.org.uk/
(Free Birth, Marriage & Death Records)
In the USA, some public libraries have census image subscriptions. Many Family History Centers do too. FHC’s are small rooms in Mormon churches. They welcome anyone interested in genealogy, not just fellow Mormons. They have resources on CD’s and volunteers who are friendly. They don’t try to convert you; in fact, they don’t mention their religion unless you ask a question about it.
This is a general hint: Even though you go in through YA Canada, YA Australia, YA UK or YA USA, all of the questions go into one big “pot” and get read by everyone in the world who speaks English. Most of the people here are in the UK and USA, but you sometimes get questions and answers from people who worry about kangaroos eating their roses. So – put a nation, or, better yet, if you are asking about a specific individual, a nation and a state / province, in all of your questions. It will help people help you.
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* Actualy, it is just the top 8. Rust Skipper resigned and “Ted P” is an earlier me with a different account, that I cancelled after another idiot (not the paste complainer) let me do 2 hours of work for him discovering things he already knew and didn’t have the sense to put in his question. I suffer newbies like you gladly, but not fools.