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Position:Home>Genealogy> Where can i find a website where i can learn what my ancesters did and how they


Question:im also curious when my family came over to america because i can only trace my family history back to 1845. And if you can tell me a website, tell me the price and if i am able to see if anyone in my family served in the military


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: im also curious when my family came over to america because i can only trace my family history back to 1845. And if you can tell me a website, tell me the price and if i am able to see if anyone in my family served in the military

Alex, think of a 1000 piece puzzle. The pieces of that puzzle are ALL OVER the internet. You (like many others starting here) are thinking in terms of one magic website, that has already put the puzzle together for you. That isn't how research works, and in family history, if it did... that would spoil all the fun. And a lot of the background understanding that you want, will show up in history websites, or maybe civil war reenactments.
Every one of those ancestors are different. You look at one at a time.. ie grandpa Jones who was born in 1870. He will probably be on the census. Depending on the county he lived in, the usgenweb page for that county, might have a transcription of the cemetery where he is buried. In the 1880 census, he should be living with his parents.. with luck, his maternal grandfather is living with them. Since 1880 shows place of birth for the person AND his/her parents, you may see that the grandfather there was born in Ohio but his father was born in Germany and his mother in Ireland.
Oh.. that county might have a LIST of persons who served in the civil war.. MAYBE even pictures of reunions that they had. Occupation is another question asked on most censuses.
Sometimes what you want, will NOT be online. I happened to find my grandpa listed for coroner reports in Cook co, Illinois. I know it is there.. but I still have to send for the file itself. Obituaries can sometimes tell how a person died, or your ancestor could have been murdered. He might be the one who got HANGED for murdering someone.
www.cyndislist.com is my favorite place for listing thousands of genealogy sources. Most are free, but not all. Ancestry is a for fee site, but you can get all census images (and other info) there. Rootsweb is one of many places that has family 'files' submitted by others who may have worked one of your lines.. no guarantee. If there is, it cuts the work, but not all of them are correct. There is this thing called documentation.. some people think it is a waste of time, others know that it is the very core of genealogy. It is where the real meat is.
I get booed and hissed at sometimes.. but if you find your whole genealogy online.. you missed out. It's like paying someone else to go out to dinner for you. They had all the fun.
Take a piece of what you are stuck on (person, date, place)and post it here to see what we can come up with. We are free.
ps .. if your ancestor was the murderer, I even know an email group that requires descent from a criminal or something like that. It's all out there.

Most of the web sites devoted to genealogy list dry facts; BMD dates and census entries. From about 1860 - 1920 there was a booming inductry in "County Historical and Biographical" books. These were like "Who's Who of Used Car Salesmen" today; if you bought a copy of the book you were guaranteed a place among the leading men of the county, and you got a half-page article about yourself.

The publishing house (there were many) would send salesmen out to a county, they would gather data and send it back, where hack writers would make everyone sound honest, thrifty, kind, industrious, reverent and so on. In some of them there is more fluff than fact. They did not check facts too closely, so if the family legend was your grandfather was an Indian fighter and you were born after your parents were married, that's what you told the salesman and that's what went into the book.

They are about all you can find on most people, unless they have an elaborate obituary. Ancestry has a collection of them on-line, and, more importantly, indexed. The basic USA subscription is $169 for a year, I think; somewhere in that region. You get census images and lots of other data bases for that price.

Some US Gen Web sites for some counties have transcriptions, if they have enough selfless volunteers. Google Books has some. If you find one in either of those places, it will be free.

To see what they were like, here is one from a US Gen Web site:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/pa/cle...

Scroll down to the halfway point and click on a person's page.

Census records from 1850 to 1930 generally indicate what people's occupations were. Although most people were farmers until about 1900 you can see a trend from then on where more and more people started moving to towns and cities and taking up a trade of some sort.

I have found that www.Ancestry.com has access to the most data bases available. It costs about $30.00 a month for membership depending on what level of access you require. Some of their data is free. They also have data on military participation - you can find where relatives enlisted for WWII and WWI and you can also see which relatives fought in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. You also have access to other people's family trees and although some of the data from these are unsourced, it can give you names that you can then research yourself.