How to Find Your Family Tree Online for Free with Genealogy Archives

If you're tired of looking through print newspaper archives, old phone books, and old family records, try looking online for information about your ancestors, family history, and genealogy research. Often the archives available on the Internet are a perfect starting point for research about your family tree. Other times you can actually find the names, dates, and events you seek in these archives.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Newspaper archives
• Census records prior to 72 years ago
• Names of as many people in your family tree as possible

1. Start your family tree research by looking in a newspaper archives database. You can search Google News by date and find some archived newspaper articles freely available on a database.

2. There are other newspaper archive services available as well that are ideal for family history research. Look in old newspaper obituaries for death records and marriage announcements.

3. Look up Census records for free online at the US Census Bureau to fill in your family tree. While they say they aren't a research nexus for genealogical research, they do state that some information, such as information previous to 72 years ago, and data on immigration and naturalization, is available. Search Census databases for birth records, death records, and other public records that can offer clues to the mystery of your family tree.

4. When you do online searches of archives for your ancestors, search for the last name you're looking for along with any identifier, which could be a place name, their home town's newspaper, the boat they came on, or the names of some of their relations.

5. Try using a service designed for genealogy research. These services help you find information about your ancestors and family history. Their databases allow you to search archives for birth dates, death dates, marriages, names, and places to help you piece your family tree together, and some have genealogy tools to organize this information.

Tips & Warnings

• Genealogy (sometimes misspelled geneology) can be a lot of work, but it's worth it in the end when you discover who your ancestors were and learn more about your family history than you ever thought there was to know!

[kkelley89]

on 7/8/2009 I've always been interested in this. Thanks for the tips! 5*