Genealogy can be an inexpensive hobby. New genealogists may feel that they have to pay for memberships, books, or subscriptions to find their ancestors. However, there are many free genealogy resources to help genealogists find and document their family tree.
Family
Start documenting your family tree by asking your family basic questions. As silly as it may seem, grab a notepad, OneNote, a Google Doc, or any other reliable medium, to record basic questions such as full names, birth dates, death dates, for all family members that anyone and everyone can remember. Maiden names, burial locations, occupations, and residences are all valuable. You may even want to get permission to record audio while interviewing your family. These recordings can be cited as sources, or saved for future generations. Ask if you can take pictures of or scan vital records, such as birth certificates, death records, even family Bibles with written records.
Ancestry.com
Ancestry is the name brand of genealogy and one of the largest genealogy communities. Ancestry offers a free membership to build your family tree online and connect with other genealogists. Many new researchers believe that they’ll need to pay to access these resources. While paying for a membership makes research much easier, most of their records can be found on other sites.
The benefit of Ancestry’s free membership includes their family tree builder. Many other family tree softwares or websites have ways to integrate or sync to your family tree in Ancestry. You can even download your tree as a data file, called a GEDCOM file, to upload it to other websites, or save as record on your on computer.
Populate your family tree with the information you gathered while interviewing your family. As you build your free and add information, Ancestry will provide hints to suggested records. While you cannot automatically view and link these records to your tree with a free account, you can use these hints to find the records on other websites, then manually add the information to your tree.
FamilySearch.Org
FamilySearch is a website with services provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you sign up for a free account, you can get access to most of their online records for free.
Find sources for the information that your family gave you, unless you happened to grab a picture or scan of the original document already. These resources will likely start connecting you to additional family members. Birth certificates sometimes contain the names of parents, even maiden names of the mothers. Death records may, as well. Census records provide a wealth of information on whole families living together, or next door to each other.
State and County GENWEB Sites
I personally love GenWeb sites. These free sites are a part of the USGenWeb project. There are sites for each US State, and most counties within each state. Since these projects are run by volunteers, some counties and states have better resources than others.
For example, the McNairy County GenWeb has only a few vital records that a few genealogists have submitted to the site. By comparison, the Hardeman County GenWeb as a link to an archive site with pages of vital records from various years!
Once you know where your family lived, check out the local GenWeb site by searching for the county name, state name, plus “GenWeb.”
Local Libraries/Historical Societies
So many historical resources aren’t even scanned or digitized to be available online. If you cannot find the information you’re looking for online, reach out to a local library or historical society. Many people who work or volunteer for a library or historical society are passionate about history or research, and may be willing to help find a particular resource.
Summary
There are plenty of free genealogy resources for genealogists to find online to build their family tree. Check out future posts for additional tips and tricks for researching your ancestry and documenting your family history!