Heritage Album

where can i find free family tree stuff?

I'm trying to see what countries my family is from and my dad needs to know if he and his girlfriend are related somewhere down the lines, lol.

Public Comments

1. You could try using www.familysearch.org it's an excellent site and completely free to use.
2. http://www.familysearch.com is a great place to begin/create a family tree. Take advantage of the free printable generation chart (a type of family tree) and the family data work sheet, which will help you keep track of information you gather from family members and other resources. http://www.rootsweb.com is a free Q&A forum, owned by ancestry.com. A lot of ancestry subscribers use it to share and collect data. You can post a query and search the message boards for others searching the same surnames.
3. you can put in searchbox, yourlastname messageboards, genealogy and in list should be genealogy.com messageboards about that name. Interesting to check out. Good luck! Tell your dad they probably are related, seems like everyone is somehow!
4. What is the best free genealogy site out there? or something very similar to it is a question that comes up repeatedly here. The answer can actually vary. Are you looking for your recent ancestors or are you already back many generations. If you’re just starting I’d recommend that you discuss with your parents about what they may already know. After discussing it with them and starting your research, you might want to talk further with your aunts and uncles and your grandparents if they’re still around. If not, do they have a brother or sister. Fifteen or twenty years ago I was surprised to find out that my grandfather had a brother who had moved down south many years ago. On a return trip from Florida I stopped and visited him learning a little about my grandfathers siblings and parents. I had gained enough information now to start searching online as I knew what to look for. For starters online, one might look at www.familysearch.org. This is a great site that the Morman church has online. As part of their religious beliefs they research their family history. And over the years they’ve accumulated one of the most vast repositories of genealogical information. It’s definitely worth checking into. I did and found quite a few ‘leads’ here. I called them ‘leads’ as the research was done by others and is not always documented. But, it’s a great place to start. From there, a beginner might want to go to www.rootsweb.ancestry.com and search through several of the options that are available there. Their World Connect Project contains a vast number of family trees that have been donated by various people who have researched their ancestry and want to share it with others. Be aware though, that there are many errors within their family trees. Many of them will be obvious upon reading. If an individual has mistakes in their work and posts it online that error will be picked up by a good many other people. One very simple thing to look for is that most girls who are born in 1843 and marry in 1857 didn’t have their first son in 1817. But, you’ll often find something similar here. If so, STOP. Don’t believe that one. I always classified this source in the same category as some of the files in family search. They are merely leads to follow. One good part of roots web is the Social Security Death Index. Anyone who has a Social Security Number, and has died, is listed here IF their heirs collected the Social Security Death Benefit. While everyone isn’t included here you’ll find it to be one of your best sources that is documented and is free. I could go on and on as there are many good sites. I would recommend that another of the first places you search is www.cyndislist.com , a site that I would describe as a dictionary of ALL genealogy sites that are online. It should definitely show you where to look for more information that may be specific to your needs. As one of my grandparents came from Canada, I have also found www.automatedgenealogy.com/index.html to be more than helpful as it has the Canadian Census of 1851 and those that are more recent thru 1911 and is a free site. The sites are out there. Go for them while they’re still free. Happy hunting! Ron