My Heritage??!?

Question

i know this is crazy....but is there some way to find..what country your ancestors came from online...or is there anywere i can go to find this out...and if there an online website it's gotta be free!! thx for the help

Answer 1

Well first you should search the us census. Find your relatives on there, census.com is a good site. On those they asked Athnicity. Then go from there.

Answer 2

I'd say, go to the message boards of ancestry.com. and post a question. There are specific message boards for different surnames, for different geographic regions, and for different places of origin.

Answer 3

Search the last name at

www.ellisisland.org

Most of the ships' manifests list which country they were born.

Answer 4

Nothing crazy about this at all.. most of us here, do exactly that, on a daily basis.

In a nutshell, you trace your living family, using records that are normally within the family.  IE birth/death certificates. Info on live persons is normally not online (there are exceptions).

Once you arrive at the 1930 and prior time frame, you'll get into census records, that date back to 1790.  Between 1850-1880, these show the place of birth for that person.  1880-1930, it shows that.. AND the birthplace for that persons parent's.

Voila. You have places of birth. Depending on the year of immigration.. you can often find the ship record; you also can often find naturalization records.  Obviously, these will be scarcer in earlier times. However.. consider a man of 75 yrs old, in 1880.. (do the math, that means born about 1805) and if HE says his father came from Ireland, and mother from France.. there it is.

Ancestry.com does have all the census records, and no.. they are not free. You can use it at the library sometimes. We also do lookups (of reasonable amount).  In general.. all research is not free (no hobby is.. ) but online subscriptions can actually be cheaper than filling your gas tank, these days.

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

One useful tool is getting familiar with how it works. Strong suggestion.. don't expect it "all" on one website. Genealogy is a long term project, not a "punch in your name and get the answer" thing.  That's no fun, really.

Once you have names, of ancestors who are not living, you can often tap into distant cousins who already have done the legwork.

edit-  with respect.. dna is accurate, but does not identify COUNTRIES or persons. It can go back thousands of years, to identify "haplogroups" (ie Europe, Asian, African).  And it isn't free.  It works.. but it is not what many people expect.

Answer 5

Mtdna ancestry test -female

Paternal Y chromosomal ancestry test- males.

This tracks the entire migration pattern of people with similar or the same genes. It's accurate.