How can you look up your family tree and find out who your ancestors were?

Question

How can you look up your family tree and find out who your ancestors were?

Answer 1

Ancestry.com is great. You will need to pay to access the site, but they usually offer a free trial - anywhere from three to fourteen days most of the time. You can cancel online before the  free trial is over. That's what I always do.

The census is the best way to locate your ancestors. Unfortunately, you can only browse the 1930 Federal Census and earlier. That means you'll probably need the name of at least one great-grandparent to begin your search. If you have an approximate birth state and date, that's even better.

Answer 2

The way one needs to start is to ask your parents who their parents (your grandparents) were.  

Hopefully they can also provide you with the names of their grandparents as well.  If so, you've got four generations started.

You can further add to this by talking to older relatives and documenting what they tell you.  Once you get back to 1930 you can check for documentation against the census for that year.  The census has been taken every ten years since 1790 although the 1890 census got lost.

www.Ancestry.com (a pay site) has census images available.  If you don't want to use a pay site perhaps your state has a genealogical library that should have them.  The 1880 Census is available FREE at www.familysearch.org.  

www.Rootsweb.com is a free site owned by Ancestry.com.  There is a lot of information on it's free pages.