Jana’s Top Genealogy Sites For Researching Ancestors
Now that we are back home, I can go to the courthouse and local cemeteries to do some genealogy research. But no matter where we live, primarily, I use genealogy sites to research my ancestors. There are so many sites out there to help with genealogy research. Some store your information so that you have pretty little charts to show your friends. Others are hard core “you have to know what you are looking for to find anything” sort of sites. Here is a break down of the ones I use, the ones I fight with, and the ones that have made all the difference in the world.
The Cemetery
Yeah…I know. The cemetery isn’t a website, but it is a great location to get information. Now that I live at ground zero for three of my family tree branches, my local cemeteries are the easiest place to find ancestors. Cemeteries in your area are probably a great place to start researching, if your family has been in your area for a while. Let’s face it, for the most part, buried ancestors stay where you put them and they come with these really handy headstones that typically have a birth date and death date. Some headstones include other information like relationships (“wife of”…), military service information, religious affiliations or club membership.
An Online Cemetery!
If you don’t live near where your ancestors are buried, online genealogy sites really help you research ancestors. Findagrave.com is a wonderful source of information. Here you will find information contained on headstones as well as extra information others have generously shared. As with all information, however, you must check it against other sources to make certain it is accurate.
Findagrave.com is a free, searchable site. I use it all the time because of the search functions. You can search for a name, but I have found that it has to be the exact name on a headstone if you are going to get a hit. Often times, I bomb out because of this. However, you can search by last name only in a specific state, county, city, and/or cemetery. This is very handy because, if I know that I had family in a certain area, I can search that area for their last name and see who all shows up. If I find a relative in a specific cemetery, I can also search that cemetery for others and then expand my search to nearby cemeteries.
The information on Findagrave.com is provided by volunteers. These volunteers will also answer questions or take photos if you request them. The volunteers that I have contacted have been wonderful and very helpful. Findagrave.com will sometimes provide links to the grave information of other family members and the proposed familial relationships. Sometimes, obituaries are attached. You never know what you will find. Ah…there is also an opportunity for folks to leave memorial comments and you may find a cousin or two leaving remembrance messages on great, great grandma’s Findagrave.com entry.
Historical and Genealogical Societies
Most counties have historical societies or genealogical societies and a lot of them have genealogy sites to help folks research local ancestors and local history. I haven’t found these sites to be as robust as what I can find in other locations (Ancestry.com, Findagrave.com, FamilySearch.org…), but what I do typically find on these sites is precious. These societies are mostly manned by volunteers who feel compelled to 1.) save local history, and 2.) help people find that history. The history I typically find here are records that don’t belong anywhere else. A short list of people who attended something. Stories about the earlier settlers in an area. You know…the stuff that shows what the people were actually doing during their lives.
The largest symposium of these types of sites is U.S. GenWeb Project. You access information by selecting the state and counties in which you wish to search. The best part is that there are real people with whom you can contact about information you need. Priceless!
My Go-To Site
Ancestry.com is the granddaddy of all genealogy websites. I am on it daily. I have been a member since 2001. My annual membership fee is $300. YIKES. If you are ready to start doing genealogy research, your basic membership won’t be that expensive. You can save money by getting access to the United States records and once those are exhausted, pay the extra money to access the other collections.
I have 10,000 plus names in my Ancestry.com family trees and nearly 5,000 records. That is a lot of information, and really, I do feel that I am a bit trapped. If I decide to leave Ancestry.com, what happens to all my information? Should I continue to pay forever, or is there any value in downloading all the documents to another location? What about having a paper copy? I haven’t quite figured it out, and so I continue to pay.
However, Ancestry.com has wonderful search features. It also provides access to more records than I will ever have time to access. Jerry and I also took the Ancestry.com DNA test and have both found cousins we didn’t know before. We also found out that family traditions didn’t match up with the science of who we are and that was very exciting for both of us.
Other Favorite Sites
FamilySearch.org is very similar to Ancestry.com. It is a free website. FamilySearch.org gives you the ability to store family information into a family tree, but their family tree feature is more for finding people who are researching the same families and individuals. Still, it is free and they have a lot of images of original documents for you to find. I like that.
Fold3.com has military records. They also have pension requests and letters written to prove that someone once served with a certain outfit. I have found my great, great grandfather’s war records, to include a physical description of him! I have a letter that my great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s son (not my direct line) wrote detailing his citizenship claim in Texas. This letter tells of how they moved to Texas, the year, and location where they settled. He was a young man who was traveling with his dad (who is my direct ancestor).
This site is fascinating. There is a discount if you have an Ancestry.com subscription. Fold3.com is searchable by years, name, state, and/or conflict. Again, if you don’t get the name exactly as it is on the records, you draw a blank when you search. I have found it is easier to give the last name and a first initial and then just spend the time scrolling through the mountains of data.
Newspaper Internet Sites
Obviously, finding old newspapers from the 1800s just laying around probably isn’t going to happen. However, there are some sites that have vast collections of newspaper pages online and these sites are searchable! My favorite is Newspapers.com. This site charges a fee, but it is the easiest of the newspaper sites to search, in my opinion. Newspapers.com allows you to search for newspapers by states (and that is huge in my book, because I don’t just happen to know a ton of newspapers off the top of my head!). You can “clip” articles digitally and save them to your account as well.
The other newspaper site I use is Fultonhistory.com. This site is free and it is searchable. I struggle with the search feature because it isn’t searchable by state or by newspaper. You put in your search and I always get a ton of non-related hits. I need to work on my search skills and figure this site out especially since it is free!
Ultimately…
Genealogy, to some, is a name, a birth date and a death date separated by a dash. Ultimately, what matters to me in genealogical research is the dash. Yeah, birth and death dates are important, but what really matters is finding stories, events, whatever you can so that you know as much as you can about the lives these people lived. My grandmother was very into doing genealogy research, but she did it old school, before computers and the Internet. She traveled to countless courthouses in different states and wrote letters requesting information. When I started using the computer and genealogy sites to research our ancestors, I think she thought I was cheating!
I love going and seeing the actual records, but what I can do online is just amazingly productive. What sites do you use to fill in the dashes of your ancestors?