I am trying to find info on ancestors. Most sites want to sell info . What site is worth the $?.

Question

I am trying to find info on ancestors. Most sites want to sell info . What site is worth the $$?.

Answer 1

Wendy gave you a good answer. There are lots of websites. Some have family trees with which you must be very cautious. Some have records. Some have mailing lists and message boards.

Ancestry.Com has all of this and is not cheap.  However, if you find it too pricey, your public library might have a subscription to it you can use.  They have all the U. S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.  They have U.K. censuses through 1901.  They have military and immigration records and indexes to vital records of many states.

You won't find everything online.

You must be very very careful about taking as absolute fact everything you see in family trees on ANY website, free or not free.  The information is subscriber submitted and mostly not documented or it is poorly documented.  You might see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see repeatedly the same info from different subscribers on the same people, but that is no guarantee at all it is correct. A lot of people copy with out verifying.  There are errors aplenty on online family trees.  The information can be useful as CLUES as to where to get the documentation.  

Answer 2

Ancestory.com & roots.web are the same company, they are the largest on the web. They were offering a free month service. If your ancestors are in their database then they are a good option.  

Answer 3

amen to Cindy C!  Genealogy is a journey not a destination.

Answer 4

If you are sincerely interested in finding some information on your ancestors, then I suggest you look in your phone book for the nearest Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints building, and ask about the incredible service that the Church offers for FREE!  It is one of the most highly respected, user friendly, accurate historical archives.  There are people who will be able to help you find out the information you need.  I go to what is called the Genealogy Library all the time, and I find the people helpful, and the information, invaluable.

Answer 5

The Mormons in Utah have the best amount of research to hunt down ancestors so check with web-sites connected to them

Answer 6

There are free sites...I would list them, but I keep getting "we're taking a breather..."

So, go to your local public library and see if they have a genealogy department with access to websites such as ancestry dot com or heritagequest dot com.

You can also just google your name, your parents' names, names of your grandparents, etc.  As genealogy sites are not supposed to post info on living persons, the further back you can go the more likely you are to find good information.

Also, check previous answers here on Yahoo!

Answer 7

http://www.cyndislist.com/

The above is a site that I often suggest, since it collects thousands of genealogy websites. I spend hours per day online, and to be honest with you.. I have only ever used ONE fee site (ancestry.com), basically for census records, and even that has been mainly to help people here. And frankly, I have not seen all these sites that people keep talking about, that want to charge you (that is over 25 yrs worth of research).  

Maybe it is me, doing something wrong.

www.rootsweb.com is free (some connections with ancestry.com but still other areas).  I subscribe to mail lists for any locality I have interest in, for free, also through rootsweb. There are many thousands of submitted family files there.. like ANY site (including familysearch.org), those files are submissions from other persons, and they are not always backed up by solid proof. LDS files are submissions, and are not verified by the church.

Assuming you are in the US, www.usgenweb.com is a volunteer network of county based sites, with varying amounts of info. Some are fantastic, with every cemetery in the county online, bios, etc.

www.genforum.com has message boards, as does ancestry.

I have yet to see any library online that charges. By the way, some libraries have either heritagequest or ancestry.com free for patrons..and SOME libraries even allow you to log in to their network from your home.

If you are just getting started on research.. the bulk of records will normally be birth/death certificates, and recent ones will be through the states. They can be restricted to immediate family, and copies via mail will be a fee.

Court documents are a major source of information. Due to volume, you can't expect those online, unless very old and transcribed. Land records (full deeds) won't be. Texas land grants (for example) are indexed and online.

Here is free. We have helpful persons (from all over the world). Each step of your research will be different, but once you have 'worked' finding obits, you know how it runs.

Genealogy is always going to have some costs. But.. I just have no clue where all these money grabbing sites are. None of them will replace your own imagination and brain power, to figure alternate ways to get the facts you need.

edit

one other comment... every ancestor in the world is not in a database.  My goal is helping you know how to find them from scratch, when others have not put them in.