Whats the best way to get information on who you are related to?

Question

I know this one sounds absurd...But I would love to start my Family Tree...And for one, I live out on farmland in the country...No close by libraries or gov. buildings to look through...And every other site I go to online you have to pay. How is it I have to pay money to simply find my ancestors.......Is there any other way?

Answer 1

ask relatives first, you'd be amazed at what you'll find out. then go to myour local library  church and ask to see their achives and records.  Baptisms, deaths, and marriages.

Answer 2

Start with questions to your oldest living relatives, reviewing any photos they or others have, and recording all of it.  

Next, go to GenForum and look to see if there is a dialogue going on any of those relatives - then follow the threads - many times the work has already been begun, or done, by other generous individuals

Answer 3

Ask your family. Look through your attic or garage for old boxes of letters and photo albums. If your family has always lived in the area, look in the local phone book for strangers with the same family name as your mother or father.

As for paying for information, look at it this way - someone comes to you saying, 'I want you to maintain a big archive of information in case I ever need to find out something about my family that none of us has bothered to record. I want you to keep it constantly updated. I want you to invest in the servers and other things needed to make it available from anywhere in the world, at any time. And I want you to do that for free." What do you say to them?

Answer 4

Ask your parents, your grandparents uncles, aunts, etc.

Answer 5

As others have said, ask your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. That said, here is my stock answer, with links:

This is a text file I paste to questions like yours. People ask similar questions 3 - 14 times a day here. By pasting, you get a long, detailed answer, but I don't get finger cramps. It is long because there are over 400,000 free genealogy sites.

It is also long because researching your family tree is as hard as writing a term paper in a History class. You don't have to be a rocket scientist, but you won't do it with five clicks. I could tell you everything I know in 30 minutes, but not 3. The fact you have to do research stops nine out of ten teens and many adults.

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 not, please edit your question to add a country. Or, better yet, delete it and ask again, this time putting inthe country. Genealogists from the UK answer posts here too. They are more experienced and more intelligent than I am. I'm better looking and my jokes are better.

The really good stuff is in your parents' and grandparents' memories. 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. Don't look for yourself or your parents. Crooks can use your birth date and your mother's maiden name to steal your identity. If your parents were married in June and your oldest brother was born 4 months later, it isn't anyone's business, which is another reason living people's dates are not on public sites.

So much for the warnings. Here are some links. These are large and free. Many of them have subtle ads for Ancestry.com in them - ads that ask for a name, then offer a trial subscription. Watch out for those advertisements.

If you try the links and don't find anyone, go to

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

It repeats each link, but it has a whole paragraph of tips and instructions for each one.

http://www.cyndislist.com

Cyndi's List has over 250,000 sites.

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

The Mormon's mega-site.

http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.c...

RootsWeb World Connect. The links at the top are advertisements. They mislead beginners. Ignore them and scroll down.

http://www.rootsweb.com/

RootsWeb Home.

This is the biggest free (genealogy) site in the world.

http://www.ancestry.com

Ancestry has some free data and some you have to pay for.

http://www.usgenweb.net

US Gen Web. Click on a state. Find a link that says "County".

http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/defa...

Surname meanings and origins, one of Ancestry's free pages.

http://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-b...

Social Security Death Index. Click on "Advanced". Women are under their married names. They are under their maiden names in most other sites.

http://find.person.superpages.com/

USA Phone book, for looking up distant cousins.

http://vitals.rootsweb.com/ca/death/sear...

California Death Index, 1940 - 1997.

    

http://www.genforum.com

GenForum has surname, state and county boards.

http://boards.ancestry.com/

Ancestry has surname, state and county boards too. They are free.

Read

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

before you post on either one.

Read the paragraphs about query boards on

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

before you search them.

      

http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/lis...

Roots Web Mailing List Archives.

Read

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

if genealogy mailing lists are new to you.

Off the Internet, some public libraries have census image subscriptions. Many Family History Centers do too. FHC's are small rooms in Mormon churches. They welcome anyone interested in genealogy, not just fellow Mormons. They have resources on CD's and volunteers who are friendly. They don't try to convert you; in fact, they don't mention their religion unless you ask a question about it.

Answer 6

Jessica, ANY hobby is going to cost something.  When I started my research,  I lived in an extremely rural area.. and this was pre internet.  The closest thing was the LDS family history center about 25 miles away, from which I could order microfilms of records, including census. Unindexed and hand cranked.  $3.00 per film to rent, which is STILL a bargain, compared to flying across country and hotel fares. And I did that, also. My friend and I would make a evening to go to the library together, and yeah.. we always stopped for coffee and pie afterwards.  

What is online NOW is a huge bargain, if you understand the alternatives. www.usgenweb.com is a volunteer network that covers every county in the US, and it did not exist in the early 1980s. It is now almost magic that you can access a library catalog from home now. SOME LIBRARIES ALLOW 'gateway' through their subscription to ancestry, and you can do it from home.

Research requires finding records. NOTHING around that. You can sometimes correspond with other researchers, which at one time, required real postage. You can do that now with email.. but you STILL need to grasp that you may be accepting their research, without any way to know if it is factual or simply copying files from someone else.

I suggest you visit two places to begin with..

http://www.cyndislist.com/beginner.htm

Not only is cyndis list a virtual encyclopedia of how and where, it gives you an idea of how many online sources there are.  I ask you to trust me on this one.. knowing the difference between GOOD research and fast/lazy is going to save you in the long run. Imagine spending 300 bucks to research an ancestor, only to find out, he wasn't your ancestor to begin with.  There is also a section at cyndi's on myths and hoaxes that you should run from.

The other location to stop by is www.familysearch.org, where you can download a free program (among the oldest and best), and look through their other guides and searches. They do have the entire 1880 census transcribed and online.. although it is always better to see the original record.

The reality is that if you really WANT to find your ancestry, you need to pay something, one way or another.  With gas getting close to $4 a gallon.. you may realize that what you can pay for, in order to pipe it into your home computer, is REALLY a service that is worth it's weight in gold.