Thread: Geno 2.0
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Old 09-10-2012, 10:27 PM   #8
Wolfpack
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Raleigh, NC
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianD View Post
Do you guys have any good recommendations for tracing the family history...other than paying ancestry.com to do it? I'd like to try this on my own, but could use a jump-start.

Generally speaking, FamilySearch (the LDS website) is probably a good first stop as they have a lot of stuff that's searchable and it's all free. Another trick is to check and see if your local library system has a deal with Ancestry for their "Library Edition" website. That will give you large portions of what Ancestry offers for free, as well. It's also entirely possible the library system may have other genealogy resources available for free as well (at the very least, local newspaper archives or things of that nature).

Probably the biggest source of information for beginners in the US is the census schedules between 1850 and 1940 (excluding 1890, which was mostly destroyed in a fire) since they'll have full family listings (prior to 1850, it was just head-of-household and a count of who lived there). If you know where your grandparents or great-grandparents lived, they should show up in those census reports. From there, you can start poking around at the more specialized databases that genealogy websites have like marriage indexes or death certificate listings (most of which are transcribed, though some do have scans of microfilmed images, as well). This will help to back up or disprove or even introduce new information and perhaps extend family trees further back in time or add new members depending on what's in the database.
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