Discover your Family Tree
Posts tagged Free
Free Family Tree
May 2nd
When you find a family tree for free, please recognize that someone else has gone to a great deal of time, effort and perhaps expense to make that information available to you. You are the beneficiary of their hard work.
There are several ways to find out whether someone has prepared a free family tree for you or one of your ancestors. One is simply to ask your relatives if anyone in the family has done any work on the family tree and would be willing to share it with you. Most people who research family history are not doing it for profit but for the love of it. They are usually very willing to share their findings with others. If they have incurred expenses along the way, they may ask for a donation to help defray the costs. Family reunions are great places to go to get more information for free on your family tree. Not only can you get the genealogy (names, dates and places) but you are more likely to get stories about your ancestors’ lives and personalities.
Another way to find out if there is a free family tree is to type the name of one of your ancestors into a search engine such as Google or Ask. If someone has prepared a family history or gone to the effort of putting it on the internet, then you immediately benefit. Please make sure you actually do tie into the free family tree you are looking at! There is a greater variety of names today than there used to be, and a plethora of John Smiths out there! While the information on the internet is free, the family tree may be printed and that will cost you the paper and ink it takes.
Libraries are also a good place to look for family trees. My husband once found, in the Library of Congress, a chart showing his ancestors from the original immigrant, Jacobus Breckenridge, on down to his grandfather with various siblings and branches. Other than the cost of photocopying, he was able to obtain this family tree for free. Most public libraries have historical records of the area where they are located and published books about families who lived there. Occasionally they will place used books, or books that are less frequently used or for which they have multiple copies, on sale and you can pick up family tree information for next-to-free.
Whether or not you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you can access their online databases of family tree information for free. Simply go to www.familysearch.org and then you can choose to search for an ancestor by name or see whether they have a book with your family surname. If you search for an ancestor by name, you will also need some basic information about that person such as approximate birth, marriage or death year and the place where these events occurred. When you find your ancestor, and you are sure it is the correct person, you may be able to get their pedigree or immediate family (spouse and children). This depends entirely on whether the information was submitted as a pedigree or as an individual. The books they have at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, are usually on microfilm and you can order them for only the cost of shipping the film to your local family history center. Their collection of books is indexed so that it includes all surnames in the books, not just the dominant family surname.
In all of these cases, someone else went to the effort of researching and compiling family tree information for those who follow. If you find an error, please let the author know (and submit documentation showing why you think you are correct). Most groups or individuals who publish books will also publish updates and addendums. If you wish to submit updated information to FamilySearch, they are in the process of combining all possible duplicates in New FamilySearch, which is currently available only to members of the Church.
Whichever way you chose, family tree information can be found for free.
Free Genealogy Search
Feb 1st
Nowadays, a lot of us may feel overwhelmed by the amount of instant information that is currently available on the internet with regards to doing our genealogical research. When I started my degree program in family history at Brigham Young University “back in the day”, we took courses in paleography and history as well as in research sources for different geographical areas. BYU offered a bachelor’s degree and one could go on to become accredited in certain countries by taking a lengthy and exhausting two-day exam. Today much of that has changed.
I’m giving away my age here but I’m not sure the internet had been invented when I graduated. We used resources provided by the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, some of which was available at the university. We made frequent trips to Salt Lake. Except for the cost of gas, doing genealogy research was free.
Today much of that has changed. We rely more on the internet to do our free genealogy search. It is convenient and, other than the cost of subscription to an internet provider (which can be eliminated by going to a public library or internet café), there is usually no charge. There are many good, reliable sources for doing free genealogy searches. Most of them would qualify as secondary sources; that is, sources compiled from original records and pre-digested, if you will, for our consumption. When you rely on this type of free genealogy search, you take several risks.
First, you may not know for sure that the line you are following is yours. Unless you make a positive connection with someone else’s compilation, you may take off at the wrong starting gate. Then there are problems with another person’s translation of handwriting (“Is that David or Daniel?”), with their conclusions and with their typographical errors. Even if you are looking at a site that has transcribed tombstone inscriptions from a cemetery, the stone may have been so badly worn that what it says is only a guess.
Rife with problems are indexes, and there are a lot of them out there, even on web sites that provide search material for your genealogy that is not free. Someone in “Chumbalumba”, as the commercial says, may not be familiar with the spelling of your particular surname. I have even seen English-speaking Americans index names incorrectly. For example, I searched for a long time for several families with the surname Knox. I couldn’t find any of them until I accidently found them indexed as Rnox! That is not even a possible combination of letters in the United States!
Please don’t mistake me – I’m not saying not to use these free genealogy searches – but please do use them wisely. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try to imagine what the original handwriting might have looked like. Could someone have translated “Ma.” for Mary when you are looking for Margaret? Please do not get hung up on the spelling of a surname. Mackenzie and McKenzie and MacKenzy are all the same name. Watch out for “Jos.” which could be Joseph, Joshua or Josephine.
Use the results of your free genealogy search as a sort of map to let you know where you might look for documents to verify those results. You will very rarely find original documents when you do a free genealogy search unless you sign up for a free trial on a web site of interest. The only guaranteed places to find original documents for free are at the Family History Library (and its associated family history centers – but even then you can run into problems with the quality of microfilming), and depositories of documents such as courthouses, churches, government offices and sometimes historical or genealogical societies.
Genealogy Site
Jan 29th
There are a ton of genealogy sites on the internet these days, since researching genealogy has been one of the top two hobbies, along with gardening, for decades. Genealogy sites usually come in two varieties – free, which are usually compiled sources, and subscription, which tend to offer copies of original sources. I’m not saying that you may not have to pay for compiled information or that you cannot get an original document unless you pay for it, but generally that is the case.
One genealogy site which offers compiled information for a fee is OneGreatFamily. Members download their family history onto the site so that others can share their research. Every effort is being made to make sure dates and places are correct and complete. OneGreatFamily offers other services too but their main emphasis is on sharing family lines with other subscribers. Finding the work that other people have done avoids repetition of a great deal of work.
A cross-over in the genres of genealogy sites is www.familysearch.org. This is a free site and offers not only research that other people have done and access to indexes to such things as the Social Security Death Index and some select censuses, but also their library holdings of original documents. The “original document” aspect of this genealogy site comes with the millions of records they have microfilmed and make available free of charge (except shipping and handling) to the public. They have microfilmed all sorts of records pertaining to genealogical research from countries across the globe.
Fold3.com is a subscription site that specializes in original documents but also offers a free side to the genealogy site. Ancestry.com and its affiliates is another such web site. For a fee you can view images of original documents but you can also share your story or stories for free. Sharing is a great way to get past that sticking point where you just have not been able to find the records necessary to further your research. By posting a question or writing an article to put on their sites, you may get responses from those who have overcome the problem you now face or who have more information than you do.
Public libraries and some university libraries have free web sites that let you know what their genealogical holdings are. The L. Tom Perry Special Collections section of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University lets you see exactly what they have, and which ones have been digitized and are available online. You can also see what records, usually on microfilm, the BYU Family History Center currently has. Since they are adding microfilm almost every month, it pays to look for a particular item later if you did not find it the first time. Both these genealogy sites can be accessed by going to www.byu.edu.
I could list hundreds of genealogy sites that you could use but you can see the list yourself by typing “genealogy” into any search engine. As you browse through them, you will find that some are better than others and some might not meet your research needs at all.
Free Genealogy
Jan 17th
Whether you are beginning to trace your genealogy or are an expert at it, you may be daunted by the occasional expense involved in getting information about family members. There is, however, some help in the guise of free genealogy web sites and other sources which cost little if anything.
If you type “free genealogy” into a search engine such as Google or Ask, you will find a lot of internet sites that advertise free genealogy. Some of these are www.publicdomaingenealogy.com, www.accessgenealogy.com, www.familysearch.org, www.olivetreegenealogy.com, www.kindredtrails.com and www.ancestralfindings.com. These are just a few that came to the top of the list when I searched for “free genealogy”. I went through the process of registering for www.publicdomaingenealogy.com as an example and they didn’t want my credit card number or anything personal other than my name, address and email address. Their Terms and Agreements also looked non-intrusive. However, when I accessed the email they said they would send to verify my email address, it came up with “MyPoints, smartest shopping program.” So I am not going to continue because I do not want my security to be compromised. This may be the case with some of the other sites that offer free genealogy – I just don’t have time to try them all. I did try Olive Tree Genealogy and Kindred Trails in the past with no problems.
One very secure site which gives you free genealogy and does not ask all sorts of compromising personal questions is www.familysearch.org. This site is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. They offer information gathered and submitted by many other people from around the world whether they are members of the Church or not, free genealogy searches on the Social Security Death Index and some census indexes, and access to their library catalog of holdings of genealogical records on microfilm, including books about surnames, events and places. This collection of books includes historical books held by the Harold B Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. They also offer articles about genealogy and research guidance to assist you with your genealogy. You can print most of their material and can order their microfilm through you local family history center. One of the links under Library will give you the address, phone number and hours of your nearest family history center.
Other free sources for your genealogy include public libraries, cemeteries, web sites set up by genealogical societies and historical societies, and don’t forget the free trials that many subscription sites offer. To get the free trial however, you will usually need to give them you credit card number, which puts a lot of people off. If you subscribe for a free trial from such sites as www.ancestry.com or www.fold3.com, make sure you note when you signed up for the free trial and when you will need to call to cancel if you decide not to subscribe. Make sure you have their customer service number on hand and be prepared to listen to their sales pitch. If the site does not have the records you are looking for, do not subscribe hoping that someday they might!
