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Position:Home>Genealogy> Trying to get info on an ancestor,but every site i go to charges. I want FREE?


Question:Here's a couple: www.rootsweb.com www.familysearch.org You may want to check www.usgenweb.org as they break it down by state.
Also, check what your local library offers. You may be able to access ancestry and HertiageQuest for free.
As you go along, you will pay for copies of vital records, film, etc. But its worth the cost.


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Here's a couple: www.rootsweb.com www.familysearch.org You may want to check www.usgenweb.org as they break it down by state.
Also, check what your local library offers. You may be able to access ancestry and HertiageQuest for free.
As you go along, you will pay for copies of vital records, film, etc. But its worth the cost.

There are many commercial websites online, and in some cases it is worth the fee (to access records that are not online otherwise). Ancestry is offered via many public libraries.. then you pay for gas to go, and when they are open.
You need to check out wwww.cyndislist.com, for thousands of genealogy resources. I have used thousands of sites, and never subscribed. It is important to understand that doing the research yourself means finding pieces of your family in different locations, and pulling the 'tree' together. Not ready made family history.
Just as a note.. there are always SOME costs with any hobby, unless making quilts from old clothes.

Rootsweb.com (http://www.rootsweb.com/) offers both free "Mailing lists" as well as free ''Message boards'' where folks seeking information about their ancestors can connect with people who have research interests similar to theirs.
This site sponsors about 30,000 mailing lists and 161,000 boards that deal with individual surnames, cities, counties, states, countries.
For free help with English, Irish, Scottish & Welsh ancestors try GENUKI.com (http://www.genuki.org.uk:8080/big/).

familysearch.com is free. if you visit a church of jesus christ of latter day saints, they usually have a TON of help and info.

The Church of Latter Day Saints is the main free site, and provides many church records and the censuses of 1880/81 (England, Wales, America & Canada). There are others which tend to focus on one area or family name, usually maintained by an amateur genealogist wishing to share their findings. It's always worth googling the name and known place/places of your ancestor to see if there's a database or forum message mentioning them (by this means I once found a book written about an ancestor).

In the UK FreeBMD and UKBMD are very good for free birth, marriage and death information, the former covers the whole of England & Wales, so is the most useful. The UKBMD site is a gateway to the counties that have uploaded their BMD indeces (which often contain additional information to FreeBMD), but not all counties have one of these.

At the end of the day, if you're serious about genealogy, subscription to Ancestry is probably the wisest move, as it gives you a lot of census and BMD information, plus many other records.

For a single search on one person, you can buy pay-per-view credits or look for a willing volunteer to search for you. In the UK, rootschat is the best, where there are countless people with Ancestry access willing to search on your behalf (and there are boards for common immigration destinations, so you are likely to find some American and Canadian record volunteers there, too)

First place to start is USGenWeb,
http://www.usgenweb.org/ then the state and county.
These state/county sites are all run by volunteers and the answers may not be there, but it is a starting point.
The paid webites like ancestry.com and others have records that are not always available anywhere else.
It would be nice if all genealogy was free but it is not and has never been anywhere. Long time researchers have always paid the price in various ways
Although we can go to libraries and use them for free, someone's $$$$ bought the books, microfims and other genealogical data and pay for the utilities.
The same holds true for online data. Some one paid for it somewhere.
For the price of a bottle of soda daily, you can have paid access and money left over.

Be very wary of family trees on any website, free or paid. The information is user submitted and mostly not documented. Even when you see the same information repeatedly by many different submitters, that is no guarantee it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying. Use the information as clues as to where to get the documentation.