29th
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Genealogy Research: Starting a Genealogy Search for Free
If you’re just beginning your genealogy search you’ve no doubt heard that the vast resources available to you online are going to be your best option. There are premium genealogy sites that charge so that you can access their information, but there are also free ones. These free genealogy sites won’t have the amount of information as the sites that charge, but they’re a good place to begin your genealogy search. So in you quest to discover where you came from and who your ancestors were, begin your genealogy search online and start your journey into tracing your family tree.
Before Going Online
The best free genealogy search won’t include the internet. But it does include questioning your own family about their history. You can gain a lot of information by asking your parents about your grandparents and asking your grandparents about your great grandparents. And if your great grandparents are still around you can most certainly delve even deeper by asking them questions.
In speaking to my own family I managed to find ancestors gong back to the Revolutionary War and even beyond. I found that on my mother’s side of our family my uncles, grandfather and great grandfather all worked as engineers or workers for the Penn Central Rail Road. I also found that great grandfather on Dad’s side was a long time homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department. Many of the things I found out, I had already known. But it was fascinating to find out the things I didn’t already know too.
Getting Online
There are several free genealogy research sites that you can use. It’s as simple as typing in the term “free genealogy search sites” in your search box. Since many people are likely to have your same surname, finding your ancestors will be an involved search process. Yet once you get on the right track just see how far it will take you. As much of a long and tedious process as it is, it’s also lots of fun discovering your roots. And when you get into past generations that you never had the slightest idea about, the real fun begins.
After exhausting the information that’s available on the free search sites then you can head on over to one of the premium sites to further your genealogy research efforts. The premium sites certainly offer more information that the free genealogy search sites, but make sure that you have a solid base before investing a lot of money into a premium site. Your best course of action is in staying with the free genealogy search site as long as possible. When you’ve covered all avenues available there then the cost of a premium site will be a great investment as you will now be accessing information that you know you wouldn’t have found on a free site.
Doing a genealogy search on your family history is an admirable task because you won’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. This goes for individual people as well as entire family histories. The free genealogy search sites are there to help find our where you’ve come from and they’re a great tool to start your genealogy research in tracing your family tree.
29th
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2011
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Once you make the decision to build your family tree, you’re bound to wonder where the information is going to come from. How do you find what you need to know to research your own family history and how much is all of this going to cost. To the question of, are there still free genealogy databases on the Web that are worthwhile, the answer is yes.
Free genealogy databases exist for grave sites, census information, marriage documents as well as birth, death, marriage and divorce certificates. Some states even offer their own documents as a service to genealogists. Very often you’re going to find that you’re not able to access information which is dated within the past thirty or forty years, but prior to that time period, vast numbers of groups will permit you to use their databases to gather any information that you need to help you grow your family tree.
A great deal of useful information can be found from free genealogy databases but in some cases they may not have all of the details you want. If after much searching you still can’t find the answer on one of the free databases, you will have collected enough details to perform a very specific and targeted search on one of the paid sites. This will keep your costs lower.
Some of the more interesting and older genealogy databases which exist online for you to use are the passenger ships lists for ships which came into Ellis Island (ellisisland.org), along with a huge free database of more than thirty thousand records of marriages are available on the Genea Links web site genealinks.com.
Other free genealogy databases that are worthy of note, and a good place to start are:
Social Security Death Index (SSDI) – Close to 70 million records can be searched at ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com.
Internment.net – burial records for thousands of cemeteries across the.
FamilySearch.org – this is the site for The Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints. It contains over 700 million records.
If you enter “free genealogy databases” into your search engine as you may already have done, you will have found hundreds of results, however not all of these will be truly free. Some will only provide a free summary list of first-name, last-name and perhaps a state for the records that match your criteria. If you want details of an individual record then a fee is required, in fact most of these link back to ancestry.com. Others may require your name and email address before permitting access but the information will be free. There are also a few sites where you are required to transcribe some records in order to earn credits to access their online records.
Free genealogy databases are a service to the community of genealogists, and can always use volunteers to help them transcribe their information and get more of it out online to help people find what they need. If you’re using the free genealogy databases, consider adding some volunteer time of your own to help transcribe them.
28th
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2011
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If you’ve been around the genealogy world for a while, you may have noticed how family tree scrapbooking is the next, new level beyond simply piecing together the standard family diagram. After investing the time and money to pull together all the necessary documents to verify your results with confidence, now what? Well, people are having a field day with family tree scrapbooking. And there are all sorts of creative ways people have gone about presenting the material in a safe format without concern that they’ll be lost or damaged.
Whether or not you’ve done any scrapbooks in the past, you’ll find family tree scrapbooking to be pretty straightforward. If you start out with a binder or portfolio of good quality you’ll be happier long term. Another thing to consider is how you may want to have room to expand over time. With some you can simply add pages. It’s best to be able to insert pages throughout, just in case you need to add something along the way that you forgot or later found. With family tree scrapbooking, you just never know when you’ll locate a special item that you want to catalogue.
Now, before you actually begin the family tree scrapbooking process, it’s really important to stop and think about how you want your pages laid out in the book. Sometimes you can get a better idea by setting out all of your papers, awards, memoirs, pictures, and documents first. You can generally get an idea of how you want things arranged via this dry run. Organize everything in a meaningful way before you commit it to the scrapbook.
Family tree scrapbooking also provides some wonderful “quality control” benefits. See, when you’ve laid out the results of all your research, it gives you a chance to see what all you’ve come up with, in one fell swoop. In the process, you’ll likely want to label every page. As you do so, you may realize, for example, that you don’t have this person’s full name, or that lady’s maiden name.
Additionally, you’ll come up with other things you’d like to know. And as you add entries such as place of marriage, it can quickly help you see what’s missing. This gives you a concrete way, like a checklist, to recognize and remedy missing data before your sources pass away! You can simply go back and get this information. And this leads me to another key reason for family tree scrapbooking. You are going to come up with information that really doesn’t have a way of being documented. But the scrapbook will at least give you a place and a way to write it down so it’s not forgotten. In fact, you could just include your own notes, which itself is a neat way for documenting the process you went through to create the masterpiece.
My final piece of family tree scrapbooking advice has to do with the fact that the project can grow very rapidly. Just realize that simply stepping up to consider your own parents sends you down two entirely different channels. There’s a big decision point as to whether you want to run down one side of the family until complete or not. Alternately, for family tree scrapbooking purposes, you may choose to go chronological, incorporating both sides of the family as you go. I know it can seem odd to create an intentional family “schism” and just follow one side through to completion when doing a family tree, but handling both sides simultaneously can be taxing. Either way, just keep good records and you’ll do fine.
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