What or where is the best place to research your family tree?

Question

What or where is the best place to research your family tree?

Answer 1

I use ancestry.com - I found out A LOT by using this site!

You can get a free trial (a month I think) to try it out.

There is also geneology.com

Answer 2

Family Bibles, talking with elderly family members, go through old photographs & get as many identified as possible (again with the elderly family members).  Get to the oldest family members you have (not just those in your direct lineage either) before their knowledge is gone and pick their brains.  Take a recorder & take notes.  If your family has reunions, go.  And take blank family sheets & have everyone fill them out.  

Kind of basic, but start with your own birth certificate & then get copies of your parents & grandparents.  Get copies of marriage licenses, death certificates, etc.  

There's also rootsweb.com.  There are forums & mailing lists for almost every surname out there.  Plus places.  

Once you have a good number of names in your tree, you may also want to visit one of the national archives or a state library. (My sister & I visited the Indiana State Library when she was living there, it was a gold mine.)

Answer 3

http://www.familysearch.org/

http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Home/Wel...

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/...

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

Answer 4

Keats, I personally advise that the best idea is to NOT limit yourself in terms of "one best place".  Instead.. open your mind to the concept that your ancestors and information is likely to be in MANY different locations. It is not only online.. it can be at a courthouse, historical society, so forth.   A 'good' site that works for me, won't always work for you.  The answer to your puzzle could be in a family photo album at aunt Mary's, who collected the photos and has the only picture of your gr grandmother with her name and her siblings. Or the cemetery down the road from you.. which no one has bothered to walk/ transcribe. Your ancestor's tombstone can be there, with the connection you are looking for.

http://www.cyndislist.com/

Cyndi's is a massive list of online resources. The good thing about her site is to open your thinking to all the different types of sites that might be of use to you.

It is very common for people to start researching, since they now have the internet, and yes, it is a great tool. Remember, genealogy has 'been around' long before computers or the internet, and NO SITE has "everyone in the world" despite their claims.

The BEST tool is your own mind/ imagination as to where your ancestors might be. Don't lock yourself into a box, by thinking it is all on the internet.

Answer 5

Best place to start is with any of your relatives. Talk to as many as you can - and the older they are, the better! Get as much information - places of birth, complete names (you'd be surprised how often Uncle Jack turns out to have been christene Joachim, or Jacob or something of that sort and if you don't have correct names, it makes tracing the family much more difficult) as many dates as possible - births, deaths, marriages, where they immigrated from and so on. Once you have that, you can compile a rough tree with the info you have gathered and then start searching through places like the Latter Day Saints temple in Utah, which has one of the world's largest geneology libraries.