Please tell me a free way to find out my family's heritage with only my great gr

Question:

Please tell me a free way to find out my family's heritage with only my great grandmother's name in 1 week????

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Start calling the relatives you know. Lots of people keep at least some family history in their Bible. Also remember to ask the relatives you call for name/phone number of relatives they know that might be able to provide more information for you.

What you'll find is that quite a few of your relatives know a little bit of your family's history (and sometimes the history doesn't agree between relatives). That gives you at least a great start, especially if they have birth dates/death dates, and locations.

Genealogy forums provide an interesting way to run into relatives you've never met before or knew in childhood, but lost contact with (I met my Dad's cousin that actually went to school with him, though I'd never met her. She had moved to Iowa while our family has lived in several cities. She provided an incredible amount of information, including a contact that provided info on our family before they came to America - something that's always very hard to get).

The Ancestry.com and other genealogy websites provide a way to fill out details and/or verify info you already know. Once in a while, you get lucky and find totally new information. In fact, I hit the jackpot on one branch of my family. They came from Guernsey Island and an extensive genealogical history of Guernsey Island residents already exists all the way back to nearly 1600. Many of them founded and settled Guernsey County in Ohio when Ohio was opened for settlement. Once I matched one of my relatives, I suddenly had 200 years worth of history in one fell swoop (even though both of a married couple came from Guernsey Island, I was only successful in matching one of them back to Guernsey Island - while I have plenty of LePages to match the other half of the couple to, I had no way to determine which LePage he linked back to.)