What is a good website to find out about your family tree?

Question:There are tons of websites out there. Some paid some free. However there is NO MAGIC WEBSITE to find your family. It's a lot of hard work documenting and searching.

If you find something online you need to document with birth, death, marriage certificates, obits and cemetery records.

Invest in a book called unpuzzling your past by Emily Croom. She is a well known researcher and takes you step by step. It is well worth the $19. I still use my copy that I bought over 15 yrs ago.

good luck on your quest

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: There are tons of websites out there. Some paid some free. However there is NO MAGIC WEBSITE to find your family. It's a lot of hard work documenting and searching.

If you find something online you need to document with birth, death, marriage certificates, obits and cemetery records.

Invest in a book called unpuzzling your past by Emily Croom. She is a well known researcher and takes you step by step. It is well worth the $19. I still use my copy that I bought over 15 yrs ago.

good luck on your quest

ancestry.com

Try www.Ancestry.com. Hope you find what your looking for

You have to do the research yourself, lazy-***.

Holly is right. Good family history requires documentation. Family trees on websites, free or paid, are usually not documented, or poorly documented. You might see different information from different submitters on the same people. Then you will see repeatedly the same information from many different submitters without documentation. A lot of people copy without verifying. As one poster said to another question, some people merge files into theirs. If a person has Family Tree Maker they can do that easily and they they can upload the tree into Ancestry.Com or FamilySearch.org. So people pick up a lot of junk from each other. Use the information in family trees that have been submitted as CLUES as to where to get documentation, not as absolute fact.

The first thing you should do is to get as much information from your living family as possible, particuarly your senior members. Tape them if they will let you. They might be confused on some things, but what might seem to be insignificant story telling might be very significant. People who have done this say if they go back a few years after doing research and listen to the tape again they hear thing they didn't hear the first time around. I wished I had taped my paternal grandmother and one of my mother's aunts. Sometimes I discover something then I remember that's what Aunt Fannie said.

See if any have any old family bibles.

Your public library probably has a genealogy section. You should check it out.
They might have a subscription to Ancestry.Com you can use. What I like about Ancestry.Com is they have lots of records and seem to be getting more all the time. They have all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet. They have U.K. censuses also.

A Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints(Mormon) Church has lot of records. In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection. Their Family History Center can order microfilm for you to view at a nominal fee.

I have never had them to try and convert me or send their missionaries by to ring my doorbell. I haven't heard of them doing so to anyone else either. They are very nice and helpful.

You will need vital records, births, marriages and deaths which usually give parent information. The death certificate and application for social security numbers that I hae seen both give not only the names of each parent, with mother's maiden names, but their places of birth.

Now if you are in the U. S., each state has its own laws as to who and when a person can obtain birth and death certificate. Also, in most states, governing bodies(state,county and city) were not recording vital information until the first quarter of the 20th century and they didn't all start at the same time. Even once they started a lot of people who were born at home or died at home did not get recorded.

So before those vital records were recorded you need to turn to church records, baptisms, First Communion, Confirmation, Marriages and Deaths.

You may want to try "OneGreatFamily.com" or "Genealogy.com". If these do not work for you, try "Roots.com". I have try them and they have help me a great deal.

Gold star to Holly, today.
Ancestry is simply the most popular and well known site. It may not have your ancestors, and the pitfall is that if they are not there, you still may not know how to find where they ARE.
Most people here might snarl at me for even asking... would YOU know how to find your ancestry, without even a computer? People did research before the internet, by looking for specific and explicit records that verified the relationship of one person to another. Meaning.. birth/death certificates, court documents, church records, tombstones, family photos or Bibles, old letters.. I could spend the next hour, typing the list (and it would not be complete).
Good marketing now leads you to expect to type in your name and find a complete family tree.
<expletive deleted>
The answer is to know which records are reliable, which are not, and how to use the computer as a tool to find those records..AND know when you will NOT find it online. It's a compromise.
Finding a submitted family tree online is not research. I say that, at the risk of insulting many people, but it is a fact. What you are finding is SOMEONE ELSE'S file, which MAY OR MAY NOT be accurate. If they copied their file from somone elses file, the same applies.
When you see a file with a notation that the info comes from grandpa Jones' will, filed in St Louis, Missouri.. that file is likely to be worthwhile. YOU may also locate that will online, which means you found the source record (but you still would be better to send for a copy of the original will, so you can be certain that it says what is typed online.
Example- I just found (online) the cemetery transcription for my mom's 1/2 brother and his wife. I now know where he died, as well as his son and wife. I see from the one entry that the son's wife is shown to be born, one year after she was married. Talented lady!! I am heading over to ssdi to get her right year of birth.
This isn't a family tree. It is PART of a tree, one detail at a time, that I combine with OTHER details. I am using the computer to find those pieces, including asking for help from others (who found other pieces for me on ancestry).
You may find valuable 'trees' on the internet. My advice is still that you take some time to read a tutorial on how to find records.
http://rwguide.rootsweb.com/
Here is one of many. You will be amazed at what can be found (online or off) about your history. Knowing what good records ARE, and how to find them is the best tool you will have.

Ancestry works for me, but I live in the USA and bought a census subscription.

I teach an introduction to Internet genealogy class at our local public library. The mistakes most beginners make most are:

1) Expecting to find their parents.
2) Putting too much information into the search engine.

1) Most of the genealogy data on the internet is about events over 70 years ago. Unless your parents have died, their birth and marriage dates won't be there. You have to get to 1930 (1900 would be better) off the internet.

If the Internet had birth, death and marriage data about living people on it, people would find out which ministers tom-catted around in their younger days, leaving single teen mothers all over half the county, and organized religion would falter.

2) Don't fill in all the fields on RWWC or the LDS. Just name, birth year and spouse. If that doesn't work, try just name and spouse and then just name and birth year. Use soundex and make the year range +/- 5.

There are 400,000 free genealogy sites. Which one works best for you is anyone's guess. I like the West Virginia Archive of BMD statistics, but if you are in Dublin, Ireland, it won't be much good to you.

I would add to much of the good advice here that, just because a family tree on the web doesn't cite its sources, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's junk - use the site's PM facility or the submitter's e-mail address to ask them where they got their info. I'm afraid I haven't cited all my sources on the two sites in which I have posted my family tree - mostly, I admit, through indolence, but partly because one of the sites only gives you a miniscule box to type all your sources for each person. As I often have 10+ documents relating to one person, I'd never fit it all in. I'm always pleased to share my sources when people ask, though.