How to Find Lost Ancestors
People attempt to find lost ancestors for a variety of reasons. Some hope for unclaimed inheritance money while others are simply curious about their forefathers. People living in the United States often find ancestry searches quite challenging because often ancestral records are located overseas. Most people can find information on family members born after the late 19th century, but records from before that era are harder to find.
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Instructions
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Contact your surviving relatives and ask them to provide you with information on your family history. Ask them about people and places. You may already think that you know everything about your family line, but people are often surprised how much they can learn from their grandparents and elderly relatives.
Conceivably, your elderly relatives can remember some details about elderly relatives that they knew as children. If you find out names and places that your ancestors lived, you know where to search for more detailed records.
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Draw a family tree comprised of the information you gathered from your relatives. Use a very large sheet of paper for the family tree. Start with your name in the center of the bottom of the page and branch outwards and upwards as you gather information.
Once you have completed inputting the information that you have, write down a list of geographical locations where your oldest known relatives lived. Take note of the ancestors' names and any other information that you have, such as their dates of birth.
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Go online and visit websites such as Ancestry.com, Heritagequestonline.com and searchforancestors.com. These and other genealogy websites already have huge databases of information containing records from the last 300 years. Some of the files from the U.S. National Archive have been downloaded onto these websites.
You must sign up and pay a membership fee before you can access records. Read the services offered by each website and the areas of specialty. Make sure you only use a genealogy site that covers the information you require. It would not help you to join a U.S. genealogy site if your ancestors all lived abroad.
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Go online and access genealogy websites and government record databases for other countries where your ancestors lived. You can find some census records from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia online. Use family names and city and town searches to look for information among census, wedding, birth and death records. Normally, you have to pay a fee for these websites, so make sure you understand the exchange rates as prices are not listed in U.S. dollars.
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Go to locations that hold ancestry records and search for information. You can visit the National Archive building in Washington or one of the other regional locations. The National Archive does not keep records online but its website does have microfilm databases that allow you to narrow your search. You can also visit county, city and state courthouses and look through public records of death, marriage and birth certificates.
If your budget allows it, you can visit churches overseas and look through old records for long-lost ancestors. Before doing this, contact the church in the town where your relatives lived to make sure the pastor allows people to review the records.
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Tips & Warnings
Many Americans visit Ireland to trace lost ancestors. Prior to the 20th century, many towns in Ireland only kept detailed records of protestant families. The majority of Irish people were Catholics, so records from before the 1890s are rare.
Ancestry searches are often time consuming and costly. Sometimes records simply do not exist, so you should not expect to get immediate results.
