Jerrod Guilfoil: Don't trace surnames. Trace ancestors with documents/records. I find with Ancestry.Com switching back to the "old search" is better. You can go under specific categories of records.I don't know which country you are in. I am in the U.S. and I am answering like you are. However, if you aren't, there are some things in research that are common to us all.Ancestry.Com is the very best for original source records online It is not free but your public library might have a subscription to it you can use. . You can get all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet. They have military, immigration, land and many other records. Indexes to vital records(birth,marriage and death) for many U.S. states. Now, not all records are online but the ones they have will save a person time and money traveling all over the country to get them.Now, you have to be extremely careful about taking as absolute fact everything you see in fam! ily trees on their website or ANY website. The trees are not submitted by some expert working for the websites but by folks like you and me. You will frequently see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see the absolute same info on the same people from different subscribers but you would be very very foolish to think for one moment that that means it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying. The internet has been very helpful with genealogy but with family trees online it has multiplied errors greatly. The information can be helpful as clues only enabling people where to find the documentation in many cases.The records they have will save you time and money traveling all over the country to courthouses and libraries to get them.Those advertisement for Ancestry.Com sometimes concern me. When they talk about finding family on census records, finding their WWI draft registration record, immigration record,they are talking about ! good original source records. But when they show someone findi! ng their family in family trees,it concerns me that they are sending a message that you can find your family history by putting in name in a website and there everything is and accurate.I like their old search better, but if you probe family trees, it will pull up a heading Family Tree Records. Those trees ARE NOT records. They are submissions by many people. Some people think it is very important to see how many names they can get in their family tree rather than have a good verifiable family tree. You can set your family tree up in the Public Member Tree or their Personal Member Tree and they will provide you with valuable hints into their records that will perhaps pertain to your family.Just verify that it is the same person. But when they provide you with hints to people in someone else's family tree that seemingly matches people in your family tree, don't go adding spouses and children and parents to someone just because they are in someone else's family tree. Not with! out verifying the information first. One regular on this board will tell you they can attach the wrong children to the wrong spouse.Documentation is the meat of genealogy whether it is in a published book or on the internet.If you disagree with something someone else has on your family members, the owners of the websites will tell you that that is between you and the other subscriber.I recently found out that me, my younger sister and my brother-in-law were all dead. The subscriber involved had much incorrect info on my family. This subscriber is one of those people who had almost 150,000 people in his/her tree.They pick up info on inlaws and relatives of their inlaws and pretty soon they are getting inaccurate information.Now there can be errors in official records. A lot of times it had to do with the knowledge of the informant or the understanding of the person taking down the information. But copying other people's family trees without verifying the information with ! documentation is a sloppy way to do genealogy.Don't expect to find livi! ng people in family trees on the web as that is considered an invasion of privacy and can lead to identity theft.Their One World Tree program is trash. When they set it up they took info from trees submitted to their Ancestry World Tree Program and tried to combine all the different info into one person showing all the different information. I have found more than once where they combined 2 people into 1. Here is a link that has links to many websites, some free, some not.http://www.progenealogists.com/top50genealogy2008.......Show more
Sammy Kar: You should start by asking all your living relatives about family history. Then, armed with that information, you can go to your public library and check to see if it has a genealogy department. Most do nowadays; also, don't forget to check at community colleges, universities, etc. Our public library has both www.ancestry.com and www.heritagequest.com free for anyone to use (no library card required).Another place to chec! k out is any of the Mormon's Family History Centers. They allow people to search for their family history (and, NO, they don't try to convert you).A third option is one of the following websites:http://www.searchforancestors.com/... http://www.censusrecords.net/?o_xid=2739... www dot usgenweb dot com/ www dot census dot gov/ http://www.rootsweb.com/ www dot ukgenweb dot com/ www dot archives dot gov/ http://www.familysearch.org/ http://www.accessgenealogy.com/... http://www.cyndislist.com/ www dot geni dot com/Cyndi's has the most links to genealogy websites, whether ship's passenger lists, ancestors from Africa, ancestors from the Philippines, where ever and whatever.Of course, you may be successful by googling: "john doe, born 1620, plimouth, massachusetts" as an example.Good luck and have fun!Check out this article on five great free genealogy websites:www dot associatedcontent dot com/article...Then there is the DNA test; if you decide you want to REALLY know where your! ancestors came from opt for the DNA test. Besides all the mistakes tha! t officials commonly make, from 10% to 20% of birth certificates list the father wrong; that is, mama was doing the hanky-panky and someone else was the REAL father. That won't show up on the internet or in books; it WILL show up in DNA.I used www.familytreedna.com which works with the National Geographics Genotype Program.Ancestry.com has a lot of failings; I tried for years to find out about my Dad's maternal grandmother. I could not find her on ancestry or any of the other sites. I finally contacted the state library in the city/state where she died; they sent me a weblink and I found her death certificate. So, if you cannot find info at one place, try another....Show more
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