Family History!!!!!!!!!!!!?

Question

How can you find out about your ansestors and your family history???? Help I really don't know my Family history and my parents really don't know ether!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 1

Your public library might have a subscription to Ancestry.Com you can use.

I believe they have the most records online.

They have all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.  They also have U. K. censuses.

However, you have to be extremely careful about taking as absolute fact everything you see in family trees on their website or ANY website, free or paid.  The information is subscriber submitted and mostly not documented.  You might see different information on the same people from different subscribers.  Then you will see repeatedly the same information on the same people from different subscribers. That is no guarantee at all it is correct.  A lot of people copy without verifying. The information can be useful as CLUES as to where to get the documentation.  Just because it is online doesn't mean it is true.

Another free source is a Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Church.  They have records on people all over the world, not just Mormons.  You need to call them or check their free website,FamilySearch.org, to find out their hours for the general public.  In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection. Their Family History Centers 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 that to anyone else that has used their resources.  They are very nice and helpful.

Answer 2

www.ansestory.com

Answer 3

This site explains what you can do to trace your family history, it is applicable to most nationalities, and there is plenty of other info on the same site.

http://www.genuki.org.uk/gs/

This is another good site

http://www.cyndislist.com/

and the excellent http://www.familysearch.org

where you can download free software to start recording your tree, it is called Personal ancestral File (PAF 5)

Answer 4

Elizabeth, do you REALLY REALLY want to know?

http://rwguide.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

Start by learning a bit about what is involved, how it works. It is right that it isn't all free.. but you can learn some things, and people here do help (no.. not fair to ask someone to do  it all for you).   If you are willing to do YOUR part, as much as possible, then people love to help.

Please, take time to go through that site, AND www.cyndislist.com (the beginner area).  You CAN often use ancestry at your local library.

It all depends on how determined you are.  It could be that once your parents see the process, and realize this is THEIR ancestry too, they may become involved.

Answer 5

Your parents must know a bit, find out as much as you can from them like their grandparents or parents names and occupations and where they lived.  Everything is significant when you are tracing your family history, for instance first names and middle names were often passed down in families.

There isn't really a way of doing it for free, you can look at the 1881 census free online, if you can get back that far yet. Sometimes there are local and family history societies in an area that put some resources online.

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

Answer 6

There's an old saying that money makes the world go round, and in the case of genealogy, never has such a statement been more true.  It is reckoned that "genealogy" is the third most searched for word on the internet behind 's*x' and 'star trek', but although their are millions of sites, nearly all of the good ones are commercial enterprises and are subscription or pay-per-view based.

The amount you can do on the internet is multiplying daily, but in order to use these indexes and records you do have to pay.  If you can't or won't pay then you won't get very far.  That's the long and short of it.  And any ideas you might have of entering your parents or grandparents names into Google or Ancestry should be quickly forgotten.  Trying to find 20th century and living people is quite difficult.  Most of the online records are from the 19th century and earlier (US census pre-1930, UK census pre-1901).  If you are trying to search after these years, then life will not be as easy as you think.  It will take quite some time.

Only today I had to take my car into town and jump on a train for an hour and spend 5 hours hunched over a microfilm reader trying to record all the examples of my surname from the 1500s to the 1800s.  I can't do that online as my parish is not on the huge Mormon website (familysearch.org).  Taking into account petrol, car parking fees, train fares and photocopying charges, today hasn't come cheap.  It never does.  NEVER try to do this hobby on the cheap.  At least if you are trying to do it properly.  It can get very pricey indeed.  If you haven't got either the time or the money, then the best advice is not to even start.  9/10 people who ask this very question on Yahoo Answers give it up as a bad idea once they realise the work involved, so you'll be in good company.

Once you buy a few books and work out how the system works in your particular part of the world then life does get a lot easier, but jumping straight into a subsciption on a paysite is not a good idea if you don't even have an idea what you should be looking for in the first place, especially if you're unfortunate enough to have a popular surname like Smith or Jones, and even uncommon surnames can prove difficult if they have more than one spelling variant.  Not everyone with the same surname is automatically related to each other.  You'll probably find that out the hard way.  All you can do is start with each generation a step at a time.

Get your birth certificate.  If you don't have it, order it.  Get your parents birth and marriage certificates.  If they've lost them, then order them.  With each certificate you get, use that information to get back a generation further.  Ordering certificates takes time.  You'll need to be patient.  Not everything is online.  Far from it.  And again, certificates cost money.  If you don't have any, then its best not to even start.  

One thing I won't do is sugar-coat the truth for newbies.  If you do this, do it properly.

Answer 7

I agree with everything Mental Mickey said, except you can get started for free. If

1) You are white;

2) You are in the USA and most of your ancestors were in the USA before 1850;

3) You are willing to go to the Mormon church Family History Center near you;

4) You are willing to work 50 to 500 hours at it;

then you should be able to get many, not all, of your ancestors who were alive in 1850. If everything above is true except you are black, 1870 instead of 1850. Slavery rears its ugly head yet again.

If you do an hour a week, it will take a long time. If you do 40 hours a week you'll finish faster. (By "Finish" I mean reach dead ends or immigrants. We never "finish" because each ancestor we find has a mother and a father.) That is just a start. It is (relatively) easy, compared to pre-1850 people. It is more than most people have.

Genealogy is a little like fishing in that you can't say it will take "x" hours per family, any more than you can tell how long it will take to catch a fish.

A hiker, on the other hand, can usually tell you how long it will take him to get from point A to point B if you tell him miles, elevation gain and trail condition.  Football players know how long a game will last; so do basketball players.