Family Tree?

Question:How can you find out if an unknown relative is working on the same family line as you are, or has completed a family tree? THANKS!

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: How can you find out if an unknown relative is working on the same family line as you are, or has completed a family tree? THANKS!

Mind Bender, above me, hit the nail on the head but forgot the links.

In the USA, the US Gen Web starts here:
http://www.usgenweb.net/
Click on a state, find the county list on the state site, looks for "Surnames". Not all county sites have them. If, for instance, your "Smith" ancestors came from Monroe County WV and the US Gen Web site had a Smith researcher, you would write to her.

Roots Web World Connect
http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.c...
has 412,000+ data bases. Half are above average, half below. Look for someone in your family who died in 1950 or earlier. In my experience, if the person hasn't updated their data in th elast year or two, they have lost interest and their e-mail will probably bounce. If someone has more than 10,000 individuals, the chance that he knows much about your line goes down.

Gen Circles
http://www.gencircles.com/
will match your individuals to others. This is enormously helpful in the later years, but if you have a link to Charlemange, you get a gazillion matches to those pre-1400 ancestors. Also, if somone has copied your date you see it again, 6, 18 or 60 months old.

GenForum
http://genforum.genealogy.com/
search for maiden names on the husband's surname page. That is, if your John Smith (1803 - 1882) married Malinda McCorkle, go to the Smith page and search for McCorkle. If someone asked about her, chances are they are doing your line.

Try your name(s) on the appropriate county boards, too.

Repeat for the Ancestry boards:
http://boards.ancestry.com/

The Mormons:
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/f...
Click on "Pedigree Resource File" and search for your great grandparents. The PRF is the most recent effort, I believe. Many (not all) of the entries have the submitter's name and snail mail address.

There are many sites that allow users to submit their family trees. Ancestry.com, familysearch.com and many more.

What you want to do is use a couple of your deceased (this is important because most reputable sites don't publish information on living individuals - filtering out these in some way from submitted genealogies) ancestors and do a search for them. In ancestry.com for example, look to the "Family Trees" section of results.

If you hit upon a match, most have contact information for the submitter. Just pop them off an e-mail.

Another possibility is to go to usgenweb.org and work your way down through states to counties where you know one of your ancestors lived. Often there is a query board for that county. Leave a query on the board and maybe someone will answer/contact you.

If you have a fairly unique surname somewhere in your ancestry (this is pretty worthless for a surname such as "smith"), you can find "surname boards" where you can post queries as well. But again, global surname boards are pretty worthless unless you have a rather uncommon surname you are working with.