How do I trace my ancestors back?

Question

I've been fiddling around with Ancestry.com, and have been able to find information on ancestors that my parents and grandparents already know about.

However, I want to trace my ancestry back. Finding out more about ancestors that I already know of is nice, but I'm more interested in finding the origins of my ancestors. My roots, so to speak.

Answer 1

You might want to try to make a list of as many of your ancestors as possible. The more names you have of your great-grandparents (on down the line) the better your search will be. Also if you have the money you can submit a dna kit (can be found in ancestry.com and other web sites) and they will tell you where your ancestors actually came from. Also National Geographic had a similar thing that actually tracks where your ancestors might have lived, going from place to place as they immigrated.  

Answer 2

Without specifics (names, dates, etc.) it's hard for our answers to offer specific new places for you to search.

Or, you may have reached the Internet-wall -- that point at which the records you need have not been digitized and their indexes (if they exist) are not online.

Check the web for the library in the area where your ancestor lived. They may have "local history" records online or be willing to do small research tasks. Look online for the church they attended. Determine who holds the archives. Again, email small questions and see if you get answers.

Search and post on genealogy blog sites, such as Rootsweb, to make contacts in the locations they lived (as well as for other searching the same surname). Someone local may be able to look up obituaries or other newspaper mentions about your relatives. (This is especially helpful if they came from a small town.)

Answer 3

How well you can do with your research by and large depends on your heritage.  If you're a white European with roots in England, Wales or Scotland then you'll do quite well.  If you have roots in Ireland, you'll struggle.  If you have roots in non-English speaking countries and don't speak the language that the records are in, you'll struggle even more.  If you're a white American who descends from European colonists who came over before 1850 then you'll also do very well in an internet search.  If you have Australian, Canadian or New Zealand heritage you should be able to do at least some work online.  If on the other hand you descend from African slaves, Native Americans or any kind of other muddled heritage like Latino, you'll once again struggle.

At some point you'll come unstuck on a line where the records just don't exist.  One of my lines ran into a brick wall quite quickly once I hit Ireland in the 1850s.  Depending on whether or not the mormons have your ancestors parish up on familysearch.org in the IGI database will utimately decide on how far you can take your tree just using the internet alone.  In all likelihood, to advance any further will require searching out these records yourself - the ones that aren't yet on the internet.  Not everything is online.  Far from it.  What is online is growing exponentially every year, but is still dwarfed by what you can't view from your PC screen.

Ancestry is the largest site out there by far and has the best resources.  You're in the right place.  The question now is if you have been collecting the right records and using them to advance a generation further back.  The method is the same no matter what.  A birth certificate gives the childs parents which can help you find a matching marriage certificate and that marriage certificate will tell you how old the bride and groom were at the time, which gives you an idea of where and when to find their respective births, which in turn leads to both their respective parents and so on and so forth as far back as you can go until records fail you.  In England and Wales at least it is not that difficult to be able to use the church parish registers to find baptisms as far back as 1538 - but only if your family stayed put in one place.  Some families were much more mobile than others.  It's when these paper trails start crossing national borders and into different languages that tracing family history can get pretty hard.  

Answer 4

"Origins" is a flexible and debatable term.

One basic that you cannot lose track of.. is ALWAYS work from present, backwards.. don't attempt to "jump" to ancient ancestry.  You have to build, one generation at a time.

When you say a "family tree of known ancestors", all that defines is what you have been told, or people know.  With respect.. getting beyond that, is what research is all about.. finding out what is BEFORE memory. You have to use records to do that (and everything you have so far, MUST be documented, as well. Memory is fallible).

thus, what you have is preliminary research.

Each step is different, since each ancestor is different. If one grandmother was born in Italy, then you learn what documents are available there. If her husband/ gr grandpa was born in NY, the trail is completely different.  You have to be explicit to find each person.

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

With a friendly smile.. research isn't what you are told. It isn't limited to what is online.  You need to review what verification you have, for each person so far, to know where to find the next record.

edit

Mickey's explaining of what is online or not, is excellent.

Answer 5

There are over 400,000 free genealogy sites. I have links to some huge ones, below, but you'll have to wade through some advice and warnings first.

If you didn't mention a country, we can't tell if you are in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. I'm in the USA and my links are for it.

If you are in the USA,

AND most of your ancestors were in the USA,

AND you can get to a library or FHC with census access,

AND you are white

Then you can get most of your ancestors who were alive in 1850 with 100 - 300 hours of research. You can only get to 1870 if you are black, sadly. Many young people stop reading here and pick another hobby.

No web site is going to tell you how your great grandparents decorated the Christmas tree with ornaments cut from tin foil during the depression, how Great Uncle Elmer wooed his wife with a banjo, or how Uncle John paid his way through college in the 1960's by smuggling herbs. Talk to your living relatives before it is too late.

You won't find living people on genealogy sites. You'll have to get back to people living in 1930 or so by talking to relatives, looking up obituaries and so forth.

Finally, not everything you read on the internet is true. You have to be cautious and look at people's sources. Cross-check and verify.

So much for the warnings. Here is the main link.

http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html

That page has links, plus tips and hints on how to use the sites, for a dozen huge free sites. Having one link here in the answer and a dozen links on my personal site gets around two problems. First, Y!A limits us to 10 links in an answer. Second, if one or more of the links are popular, I get "We're taking a breather" when I try to post the answer. This is a bug introduced sometime in August 2008 with the "new look".