How to Find Ancestral Relatives

Find information about your ancestors online.

There are many ways to find ancestral relatives, and quite a few resources are free or low-cost. It can be done with old-fashioned footwork or virtually, online. By involving other family members, you can double or triple your odds of finding long-lost relatives.



Genealogy websites abound, from places to search to ways to connect with distant family on message boards. Searching for ancestral relatives often starts out as a hobby, but can quickly become time-consuming. It's like a treasure hunt, or solving a mystery -- one piece of information leads to another, and so on, until the puzzle is solved.

Instructions

1. Make a family tree chart, a simple one, using paper and pencil. Write down everything you know or remember about your family, including dates of birth and death, locations, marriages and children's names.

2. Talk to other family members and family friends and try to fill in the blanks. Often this step will give you more leads to follow and more information. Email works well, if all those you hope to contact use email, because then you'll have a written record when they respond.

3. Create a file, either electronically or on paper -- or both. Scan and print or store any old photographs or certificates that you have, and ask other family members and friends if they'll share the materials they have access to as well. There are free programs available online to keep track of your ancestral relatives.

4. Search the Internet. In addition to free resources that include official records, there are message boards and discussion groups online that can help you find family members. Paid sites also often aid in the search for more detailed information. You may discover long-lost cousins who are willing to share what information they have found over the years.

5. Visit local courthouses and libraries. They are helpful resources and carry records of marriages, divorces, deaths and property ownership. Sometimes original documents can be scanned and printed, usually for a small fee. If you're able to travel, you can visit other areas where your ancestral relatives once lived. Scour those areas for additional information. Cemeteries are great places to search for ancestors and, in addition to headstones, many have archives of death and burial records available to be searched.

6. Personal information in the U.S. Census is made available 72 years after the date of the census; this is due to the average life expectancy of the youngest of those enumerated in that particular year. For example, the 1930 census data was released in 2002, and the 1940 data will be available in 2012.

   U.S. Census information may include names, ages, addresses, number in household, occupation, whether the householder owned or rented and birthplace. The census can be very valuable, but caution must be used when checking spelling and even the names themselves -- no proof was given to census takers, and sometimes nicknames were given or the census worker had to guess at spelling.

References

• Family Tree Builder: Create-a-Site
• My Heritage: Genealogy Research

Resources

• RootsWeb
• Ancestry
• Family Search