family tree?

Question:im looking for my ancestors or recent family peoples.. icant seem to find a free service to help me do this any ideas?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: im looking for my ancestors or recent family peoples.. icant seem to find a free service to help me do this any ideas?

Start with yourself, then your parents, then your grandparents and work backwards. This is the only way to know anything about your ancestry.

You need to talk to your relatives, find out what they know. Believe it or not, the most difficult information to gather is information from the last 70 years or so - because no legitimate site will post information about living individuals. So talk to relatives, go through family records, scrapbooks, photo albums, etc. and build your tree from yourself working backwards.

At some point, you will be far enough back where you can start looking at some of the genealogy sites. But until you establish a solid foundation of a few generations, these won't do you much good because you will have no way of knowing if any information you find actually applies to YOUR family -- just because the surname is the same doesn't cut it.

Go for it! It's fun and addictive.

Best way to start is with the family you know, write down everything they can remember then work backwards from there

Don't worry about the cost of the services. The two best services are Heritage Quest and Ancestry.com. Almost every library in the country offers them to you for free, as long as you have a library card. HeritageQuest allows libraries to open access to you through a portal on the library's website. Ancestry has two different public access packages available to libraries. One only allows you to access their site from the library's own computers. The other allows you to access through a portal...but it's much more expensive for the library and many opt for only the first way.

What you do need to understand is that none of the sites lists much information on living people. You'll need to do the legwork with your own family to find all of your great-grandparents and (possibly) their parents. Again, the library can be a great help by accessing birth announcements, marriage announcements and obituaries on microfilm for free. They also have copies of the census records for your state, and even local biographies from early settlers.

Once you get back far enough, the other place to visit is the Mormon Family History Center in your area. They will have many records in stock for you to use. Anything more specific they will let you order for just a few dollars. Their website also has a great many records listed...but caveat emptor. Don't ever trust someone else's research. There's no one fact-checking it. The errors are glaring and if you take it at face value, you'll be lead down very bad paths.

Also on the Mormon's site, you can download free software to organize your tree, free family history sheets for keeping track of bits and pieces, and a good index to their library to see which records are available for a given region.