What are the best genealogy websites?

Where can I find information about genealogy websites?

 

Where can I find information about genealogy websites? You feel proud of your family history and of course, a sense of responsibility might make you preserve the past for future generations. You are in need of finding distant relatives or find long lost family relations for different reasons. Or perhaps, you just feel curious about your family history and origins, or you are thinking about adopting genealogy as a hobby.  Whatever your reason might be, achieving results in this field will provide you with a great sense of self-satisfaction.

Hobbyist genealogists usually help themselves with genealogy websites among other tools.  For more advanced ones, genetic ancestry is also an important tool, especially when there are blanks to be filled out.

To demonstrate kinship and pedigrees is not an easy task, but technology helps us in our investigative attempts to be our own family genealogists.   Researching online saves a lot of time; we all know this.  But even if it sounds easy, it isn´t. To get the right answers we need to pose the right questions, and sometimes even this is not enough: genealogical research is a complex process and reliable conclusions are based on the quality of sources; ideally, original records.  So if you are willing to embark yourself in this exciting but also difficult issue, get ready for following different clues including indirect or circumstantial evidence and for sometimes getting answers quite different from the ones you expected.

 

What information do we need to gather? Is it hard?

In the early days of “pre-internet” family search needed to be done by hand; we had to collect information, write it out or maybe record some testimonies from different family sources, get documents, try to make handmade trees out of the information obtained, etc.

Nowadays, it is much easier to get this information, even though still a lot of manual work needs to be done.  Genealogy sites help us in this task.

• Start your research by collecting family documents and testimonies. This creates a foundation for documentary research.
• Begin with the present and work backward in time.
• There are a number of genealogy websites solely dedicated to genealogy and family history, like com that even include a lot of tools to make your work easy, for example, taking not only the information you have but also accepting your guesses and helping you to verify them.
• Records like family trees, vital statistics, birth, marriage and deaths, census, immigration, military, school yearbooks and telephone directories etc. are available online by a number of websites.
• In case you feel like digging deeper, there are a number of professional genealogists out there that can help.

Nowadays, some of the top genealogy websites are:

• www.familysearch.org -FamilySearch is a genealogy organization operated by the Genealogical Society of Utah (“GSU”), the genealogical arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. FamilySearch maintains a collection of records, resources, and services designed to help people learn more about their family history. FamilySearch genealogy website includes many resources and offers free access to them even if you don´t share their religious beliefs.

• www.ancestry.com -This is the most used subscription based genealogy website: anyone can click on the Learning Center tab and then First Steps for a site orientation. Many how-tos in the Family History 101 section are free to use, too. Once you have a membership, you can search digitized records and indexes from around the world. Use the Family Tree tab to create your family tree and post photos and stories, which you may share with others.

• www.onegreatfamily.com -OneGreatFamily is an online genealogical service which allows everyone to combine their knowledge and data to build one huge, shared database.

• www.mytrees.com -Their mission is to provide a platform where genealogists from around the world can share their research with others. To be a comprehensive research center they are indexing sites on the Internet of genealogical and family history value.

• www.wikitree.com -Wikitree’s mission is to grow a free family tree that connects us all on a free basis. Balances privacy and collaboration so that living people can connect on one world tree to common ancestors.

• www.findmypast.com – Some services in searches for findmypast include: census, immigration & travel information, birth, marriage and death registers, information related to military service, etc.

• www.myheritage.com – This genealogy website includes several innovative features and many are free: build family tree, run simultaneous searches across major genealogy databases, create a family website, find help on message boards and more. MyHeritage charges for some search results and once your family tree reaches a certain size.

• www.geneanet.org -Geneanet represents a community of nearly two million members who share and exchange free genealogical information: more than three billion people listed in family trees, acts scanned postcards, family photos, civil recounts accessible through powerful search tools, a wiki and a blog.

• www.geni.com -Geni aims at building the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their close relatives to join their family tree. All Geni users can share photos, videos, and documents with their families and merge those into the single world family tree, which currently contains over 100 million living users and their ancestors.

• afrigeneas.com -Afrigeneas provides resources for those researching African-American roots. Start with the Beginner’s Guide under the Records tab, then search marriage, death, surname and slave data databases under the same tab. (Also check AfriQuest.com <afriquest.com>, a free online archive for users to share items relating to African-American genealogy and history.)

• archives.com -This service gives you access mainly to US censuses, vital records and old newspapers in the United States, and some in the United Kingdom. The Help Center answers basic questions about searches and account information. The Learn tab leads you to how-to articles and video tutorials on many topics, including how to construct a family tree to share with relatives or post on Facebook. This inexpensive site is a fantastic beginner option.

• familytreemagazine.com – This genealogy website offers a lot of tools and how-tos for beginners. The Get Started tab introduces you to the research process. An on-line archive of how-to articles is keyword-searchable and packed with content from past issues of the magazine and web-only extras. Even if a lot of the content of this website is free, paying members have access to more features.

• findmypast.com -You don’t have to be a member of this genealogy website to access the site’s Get Started section, which offers a user-friendly guide to the research process, or its Learn More section with more advanced how-to articles, but subscription gives you access to more resources.  You can search records (best for the United Kingdom and growing for the United States) and build your family tree on the site.

• jewishgen.com –Make this your first stop for tracing Jewish roots. Under the Get Started tab, choose First Timer for an introduction to Jewish research and the site. Search databases of Jewish surnames, family trees, towns, Holocaust victims and burials. Contribute your data to the centralized “family tree of the Jewish people.”

• mocavo.com -This search engine is just for genealogy. It provides a central tool for searching records in other relevant locations on the internet, and lets you upload your own trees and documents. Basic searches are free (great for uncommon names); more-detailed searches require a subscription.

Please bear in mind:

• The efficacy of each site with reference to your own search depends on where your ancestors are from, among other things.

• Genealogy websites may be geared toward a specific religion, with fields relevant to that religion, or to specific nationalities or ethnic groups, with source types relevant for those groups.

By, Carmen Vazquez Sibils