Researching Family Trees

Getting started Deciding to research your family tree can be a turning point in your life! You never know what you will find out. Were your ancestors pirates or priests, royalty or roustabouts? You never know when you begin to unpick the tangled skein of wool that is your family tree. One of the really exciting things about this hobby is that you can do an enormous amount of research online now. Things that twenty years ago would have taken you a holiday and a lot of money to accomplish can now be done at the click of a mouse as soon as you locate the database. Not only that, free genealogy sites are all over the net so this is certainly not an expensive hobby. You can spend as much or as little as you like. Subscription and membership sites are available too and are great places to find some support and a gang of like-minded people who often know some clever shortcuts to the information you are looking for. For many the advantages of being in such a community make the money spent well worthwhile. There are also many pieces of software available for building the family tree much more easily than in the good old days where you would have to sit with your ruler and paper and draw and write all the details about the nuclear families within your ancestry by hand. google_ad_client = "pub-2311940475806896"; /* 300x250, created 1/6/11 */ google_ad_slot = "0098904308"; google_ad_width = 300; google_ad_height = 250; Some of these pieces of software are free and many are to be paid for. Either way you can spend as much or as little as you like. As a starter for you here are some of the biggest and also more unusual free sites where you can get very valuable help and information as you begin your quest. In these sites you will find birth records, marriage records, surnames, immigration records, wills, photographs...... many of which have been entered by individuals with a passion for social history as well as governments who hold national information banks. Rootsweb - World Connect Project Out of all of the online databases of submitted family tree information this is a great resource. It allows users to upload, modify, link, and display their family trees as a means to share their work with other researchers. The project is very large - currently 3 billion names and more than 300,000 family trees. There is a good chance that you will find something of use in the database - or if not will find it at least inspiring. Geneabios - Biographies for Genealogy Search through thousands of biographies of ordinary men and women posted by genealogists around the world. You can also post your own and start to be part of an amazing global community. A useful feature of this site is that it has links to the biggest online sources of information and can act as a stepping stone for you as you expand your research. Debt of Honour Register (/) A touching and unusual site is this one listing people who died in WWI and II. You will find personal and service details and places of commemoration for the 1.7 million members of the Commonwealth forces (including the United Kingdom and former colonies) as well as a record of some 60,000 civilian casualties in WWII. The cemeteries and memorials where these names are commemorated are located in over 150 countries. My Trees (/) Normally a pay-for-use subscription database, Kindred Konnections offers a free genealogy alternative which is an Extraction Project where you are offered free genealogy search time in their subscription-only genealogy databases in exchange for helping them to extract names and dates from original source documents. You sign up free to Kindred Konnections and they will provide you with a link to an online source document. It will take about 5 minutes maximum for you to type in the names and dates from one document, and for that 5 minutes of your time, they will grant you one free hour in the subscription database area of the main site where you can access over 1 billion names in their pedigree-linked archive as well as millions of other marriage, birth, death and census records, White Page Directories, and the imaged documents that have already been extracted. Unlimited hours of free subscription time are available through the Extraction Project and are well worth your time once you have started to get underway with your research. The more you know about the people and times you are looking for the better use you can make of the resource. Come to the PC prepared and this can be an invaluable resource.

access point vs router