Heritage Album

Is there anywhere I can find my family tree for free?

They'res a bunch that offer to findyour family tree but is there any legit ones for free?

Public Comments

1. No, because your family tree is unique to yourself and your siblings, sometimes you happen to get lucky and find some shared ancestors that some one else has already researched but the bottom line is that you need to build your tree yourself. Here are some sites that might be helpful www.familysearch.org www.cyndislist.com http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/
2. Don't expect to put a name in and get a complete and accurate family tree on the internet. We get your question all the time. I have cut and am pasting an answer I have to your question. Free sites, FamilySearch.org, Rootsweb. Another site is Cyndi'sList.com. She has links to many other websites, some free, some not helpful to genealogist. Now my favoriate isn't free but your public library might have a subscription to it you can use. That is Ancestry.Com. Ancestry.Com's real value is the original source records it has online. They have all the U.S.. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet. They have U.K. censuses through 1901. They have military, land, immigration and other records. They have transcribed the records but you can view the original images. Now, there are errors in their transcriptions, particularly censuses, but when you view the originals you can have pity on the transcribers. Not all records are online but the ones they have will save you time and money traveling all over the country to courthouses, libraries etc to obtain them. A word of warning: Be very very cautious about information in family trees on their website or ANY website, free or fee. They are subscriber submitted and mostly not documented or poorly documented. You might see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see the absolute same info on the same people from different subscribers but that is no proof at all it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying. Errors in family history have multiplied because of online family trees. The info can be useful as clues only as too where to get the documentation. Documentation is the meat of genealogy. I have been giving this info for 2 years on this board. I recently had my own experience. I found out that me, my sister and my brother-in-law are all dead. No date of death given but we all died in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. The only time my sister and I have ever been in New Jersey is when our family drove through there going to and from New York in 1956. So we have been dead 52 years. I started checking further and found family on both sides that married and died in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. Since my ancestry is primarily southern American colonial (there are a few exceptions) I was very surprised. I found this tree on Ancestry.Com. If this tree had been submitted to any of the other genealogy websites, Rootsweb, Genealogy.Com, FamilySearch.org etc. it would have been accepted. You can make up an entirely fictitious family tree and it would be accepted. If you disagree with anything another subscriber has on your family, the owners of the websites will tell you that is between you and the other subscriber. If you decide to put your family tree in their Public Member Tree or their Personal Member Tree their system will give you hints to records they have in their system that appears to match people in your tree. Just make sure it is the same person. Frequently in times past, several people in the same family will have the same name livinig within a reasonable distance from each other. One of my great great grandfathers had a brother, son, grandson and nephew named Zachariah Berry Jackson and there might have been others. So you really have to be on your toes. Also they will give you hints to people that their system shows in other people's family trees. Watch It! Don't go adding spouses and children to someone in your tree just because someone else has them. Good genealogy means a verifiable family tree not seeing how many names you can add to your family's data base. The family tree that had all the wrong information on my family has almost 150,000 names. I believe it is impossible for anyone to come up with verifiable information on that many people unless they have been working on a tree constantly for 40-50 years. They would have had to spend a fortune. Unfortunately it appears a lot of people think getting as many names as possible in their family history data base is what is important. Documented information is what is important and the more documentation you can have on any one person the better. A wonderful source is a Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints(Mormon)Church. They have records on people all over the world, not just Mormons. In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection. Their FHCs can order microfilm for you to view at a nominal fee. I have never had them to try and convert me or send their missionaries by to ring my doorbell. I haven't heard of them doing that to anyone else that has used their resources. Actually, I understand a lot of their volunteers aren't Mormon. Just call the nearest Mormon Church or visit their free website, FamilySearch.org, to get their hours for the general public.
3. Yes there is a place where you can research your ancestry for free, they are called your parents, grandparents and extended family, only problem is that you may have to travel to speak to them, and that will cost you money. I have traced thousands of families and have published my findings online, many of the pedigrees date from the 16/17th century to about 1900 and mainly based in Britain. Depending on how old you are and where you live, you might only have to go back a few generations to find your ancestors on the census which is great resource. In the U.K the last census available is 1901 and in the U.S it is 1930. The census has all the family information including names, ages occupation and place of birth, the latter is important as it will give you a starting point to find more information. Here is a free transcribed census for the U.S 1880 census and the British 1881 census. http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp?PAGE=census/search_census.asp The other main source are birth marriage & death certificates, In the U.K they started in 1837, and here is a free website where volunteeers are extracting information from the original indexes to make available in a searchable database. http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/cgi/search.pl The final resource is church records, so if your family were churchgoers then visit the churches to view the records and take a camera with you always when visiting an institution that holds historical records. lastly if you do live in the U.S and your anscestors came from another country, then they may have passed through Ellis Island who have their own website where you can view the original shipping manifest which includes all imigrants. http://www.ellisisland.org/ Hope this helps
4. There are 400,000 free sites that let you research your family tree. Figure 100 - 300 hours, spread out over as many evenings and rainy weekends as you like, to get back to 1850 if you are non-Hispanic white and live in the USA. Blacks dead-end at 1870, sadly. Some Hispanics have good luck, most don't. If your great aunt spent 30 years on the subject and published her work on RWWC, you may find it in 10 minutes. Some people can fall into a pile of horse poop and come out with a gold coin. Write if you'd like links.