Tracing of Family Origins?

Question:Im looking to trace the origin of my family's name...We have a name that i've never seen anybody with the same one..So i was wondering how to go about , learning about it online...Does anybody have any good suggestions to trace it..Maybe even for free ?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Im looking to trace the origin of my family's name...We have a name that i've never seen anybody with the same one..So i was wondering how to go about , learning about it online...Does anybody have any good suggestions to trace it..Maybe even for free ?

Wendy is an experienced genealogist. Take her advice. Trace your ancestry back one generation at a time. If you come to an immigrant ancestor, Ancestry.Com has lots of immigration records. Also the National Archives in Washington, D. C. is a great source.

People can get too involved in tracing the origin of their name.

If you get into websites, be very careful about taking as absolute fact everything you see in family trees on any of them, free or paid. Documentation is not required and most are not documented or poorly documented. Even if you see the same info from many different subscribers on the same people that is no guarantee it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying.

On Ancestry.Com and Rootsweb, you can probe on a name and it will give you the name and the email address of the submitter. Now if the submitter hasn't updated in quite awhile, their email address might have changed. Also it could be the persons they have with your family name might just be someone who married into their family line and they might not know too much about them.

FamilySearch.org will give you the snail mail address of the submitter.

frequently.. if your name is really that rare.. the probability is that it is NOT the original. Many names in the US were something else when they arrived, but wound up getting mangled or otherwise recorded differently, and the descendants now use the variation.
Your best bet is working the persons in your family (primarily for this, your father, grandfather, gr grandfather.. the name won't show on the others). If any of them were born prior to 1930, you may be able to find them in the census in 1930, showing their place of birth.
Finding their relatives can be the challenge.. you have to throw out the idea of "right/wrong" spelling, and use your imagination to come up with an alternate possibility.

Here are some books to look at for ideas.

A Dictionary of Surnames; Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges; Oxford University Press; New York; 1991.

A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames; Charles Wareing Bardsley; Genealogical Publishing Co.; Baltimore; 1967.

Personal and Family Names; Harry Alfred Long; Gale Research Co.; Detroit; 1968.

Surnames are the Fossils of Speech; Samuel L Brown; 1967.

Your question is in the last word.
FREE. Nothing comes for free on the Internet. every man & his dog realised some time ago, it's a licence to print money. If you are serious about your search, go to the library, they wont have your leg up there.

You could try it here. This one is free and will give you spelling variations.

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/f...