Getting Started with Family History

Intimidated by starting your family history journey? Don’t be! This series of videos gives a great overview to start your own family history journey. FamilySearch Genealogy Getting Started Series

General Family History Search Engines

FamilySearch.org is a free family history website that has member submitted family trees, digitized records, and search tools. If you want a place to build your family tree online (and keep things a little more organized), you can do so here. A word of caution though, your tree will be open to other users of the website and they may adjust or change information to add to your tree so keep a close eye on those ancestors back there! This website continues to add more images and indexed records constantly so make it one of your websites you revisit for new information.

Ancestry.com is certainly one of the bigger names in genealogy research, spanning multiple countries and even sponsoring a television show that has sparked many a new interested individuals to “take the plunge into genealogy”. This subscription based website has many, MANY records from multiple countries and member states of the United States and you can keep a copy of your family tree here as well; and choose to make it public or private for other researchers. This website does have a fee to use it but you can usually access it free through an LDS Family History Center. To find a center in your area, check here: Family History Center Locator

The National Archives has taken the fight to digitize their vast holdings to heart and has a limited number of records available online. As this organization is constantly obtaining more and more records and attempting to actually catalog them, the information is limited, but resourceful nonetheless. Also, you may find that a National Archives holds a record in one of its satellite locations about your ancestor that you may not be able to find online anywhere else.

Cyndislist.com is the “google” of the genealogical link world. You can peruse through her listings of family history websites (some requiring a fee, some not) and find out about the lesser known resources available to aid in your research.

A website that is quickly becoming my new best friend is: Reclaim the Records. These genealogical “Robin Hoods” use Freedom of Information and Open Data Requests to obtain priceless genealogical information from government agencies to put on their website for FREE. I love them. Seriously. An added bonus? All of the litigation and filing paperwork is included online and you can really appreciate the legal wrangling with a side order of snark these folks dole out to sometimes uncooperative agencies.

Genealogy Blogs:

Here is a great resource for upcoming blogs about a variety of genealogical subjects from numerous websites to make finding a subject matter blog quick and painless: Geneawebinars.com

“A genealogist with a law degree.” Is there anything more handy than knowing someone like that? The Legal Genealogist   offers so many nuggets of wisdom for research with a generous helping of intriguing case studies that I eagerly await her newest blog posts as I’m sure you will as well.

DNA is the hot-button topic in genealogy today. And it can be quite confusing with the amount of different tests available. Know Your DNA  offers reviews of some of these top tests on their website. They also have a number of helpful articles about what you can do with your DNA results, the different types out there, and my personal favorite, “The Pros and Cons of Genetic Testing.”

Genealogy Webinars and Training

Legacy Family Tree Webinars offers a variety of free and subscription based webinars for training in all sorts of areas of genealogy. Some are free and some are not; but this subscription based webinar service is well, well worth the money. If you have a new area or want to learn more about genealogy, seriously, check out what amazing resources are out there for you to see on this website.

If you love to go to in-person or virtual genealogy conferences but don’t want to search through multiple websites, then Conference Keeper is your best option. They search out all of the conferences in your local (or not so local) area and send you an updated list with options for further education and training. The emails are never so frequent that they can be considered “spam” and there are so many lineage and genealogical societies out there with excellent trainings that might go unnoticed in a broader “google” world. Sign up for their updates. You’ll be glad you did!