Where can i find out where my family originally came from for free??

I am going to paste my standard answer. Hopefully there is a tidbit or two that you can use. Please feel free to E-mail me if you would like a specific lookup on ancestry. Take care!

The best place to begin researching your family tree is with your very own family. Get a note book and write down everything that you know about yourself and your siblings. Include dates and places of birth, marriage and if applicable death dates and places of interment. As soon as you have all that, move back a generation to your parents. Once you have all of that, move back to your grandparents and keep going until you run stuck. Once you have written down everything you know, talk to your family members. Sometimes even your siblings know more than you do, but usually if you talk to your parents or grandparents they can go a generation or two further than you can simply because they are a generation or two older than you.

One thing I should mention to you since you are a new genealogist is to document EVERYTHING! This will save you so much work later. If you get a date from Grandma's bible, simply document that information. If you can get in the practice of doing this from the beginning, you will avoid making the big mistake that most of us genealogists made while we were starting out. Think about it... if you have 50 people in your family tree, you might be able to keep this information "in your head", but what happens when this number rises to 500 or 50,000? After a while genealogy gets in your blood and 50,000 people is not and unfeasible number.

What happens next is up to you. What are you interested in? Would you like to know who all of your great great grandparents are? Are you interested in a particular surname? Are you trying to prove that you are related to someone famous? Only you know the answer to these questions? Once you've decided which avenue you want to explore you can continue. There are many records out there that genealogists use. Many of them are free, but there are others that are by subscription.

One thing I need to mention is that to trace your genealogy right, it is going to cost you, whether it be for a subscription to a genealogy site, paying for vital records, making copies of documentation, buying gas to visit libraries or cemeteries, but these are such worthwhile expenditures. The nice thing is that it is not money you spend all at one time. Many of my roots came from Michigan so everytime I go up there for a visit, I carve out time to got to the library or to the cemetery etc.

There are many people on this forum who are avid genealogists who have never paid for a membership to ancestry; however, I have found it invaluable. You might want to visit ancestry because they do have some free areas on their site. I live next to a branch of the National Archives and they have every census record in existence. If you start out looking up people in the census using the microfilms, there is a process you must follow that requires you to look at two microfilms before you find the census page of the family that you need. This is very time consuming and if you are looking up a family member with a name that is usually spelled wrong, there is no guarantee that you will find it. The beauty of having a membership to ancestry is that they have the censuses fully indexed meaning you can type in a name and pull it right up without looking on two microfilm rolls. Further, you can manipulate spellings of the name and the places you are searching in a single search. This alone has made Ancestry worth the money I have spent for a subscription. Many times Ancestry runs specials and I pay under $100.00 per year so if you divide that by 12, the expense is less than a subscription to Netflix or just about anything else. Ancestry also offers Military records, obituaries, marriage records, birth and death indexes and much much more.

With that said, there are also a lot of free resources. I have over 500 links to free genealogy records that I myself have found online. Here are some that can help just about everyone.

http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/f... This is the webpage to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

http://searches.rootsweb.com/

This is a list of popular searchable databases on Rootsweb. There is a link to the Social Security Death index, as well as death records for California, Kentucky, Maine, and Texas. There are some international databases included too.

http://www.ellisisland.org/

If you are from the United States and know that you have ancestors that immigrated from other countries, there is a chance that Ellis Islands website could help you. You can actually look at the ships manifests on this site. It is so cool! You could even get information like how much money was in your great grandfathers pocket when he came over.

Then there are the message boards at both Ancestry and Rootsweb. They have boards for surnames, counties, States, and countries. This would be a great place to post information you already know about family members and attempt to build on it. It is always wise not to post information on living family members.

http://boards.ancestry.com/default.aspx....

http://genforum.genealogy.com/

You can also look at many of the existing trees out there to see if anybody has created one including members or your families. Sometimes you get lucky, but if you find one out there, I would recommend researching the information yourself before including it in your tree.

http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/..........

http://www.gencircles.com/

After you get so far, you may want to try to input your information into a family tree program. There are several commercially available; however, there are a few that you can download for free off of the internet. PAF (Personal Ancestry File) is a very respectable program that you can download at

http://www.ldscatalog.com/webapp/wcs/sto...

There are several different language versions available. Most programs have places for you to document your sources and have a file format called GEDCOM making it easy to share your tree with people using a different genealogy program or easy for you to change programs without reentering all of your information.

So, as you can see from my answer... there is a whole lot to learn about genealogy and finding resources. I learned just by jumping in and doing it. Once you get out in the genealogy community you will see that there are a lot of people eager to help you in any way they can. Have I made mistakes along the way? You bet... who hasn't? You will find though that the rewards are numerous and that it can get quite addicting.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me through my profile. Blessings

Start with your relatives (you do have some?) Then pursue at the library in the nearest large city. It is tedious and sometimes fascinating work. Then there are the identity protection laws that will prevent you from looking at "public" records.

Actually, getting too hung up on ancestry is stupid. I regularly get offers to tell me the roots of my name (which I already know) and what I get told is wrong as they wander off into Germany or Scotland (my line is English.) and my mother's line, traced by others in the family, changes spelling drastically in about 1850 - you might find you are having to trace Titelbaum or Tuttleson.

Rootsweb...owned by Ancestry.com is free. Ancestry .com does a great service and I have never minded paying .Also familysearch.org... owned also by the Mormon church. Or you can go to one of the Mormon Church's family libraries and the people (volunteers) are very gracious about helping people for free I might ad. No, I am not a Mormon, but researchers globally owe them a bit of gratitude for the extensive family records they share with the world.

TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

The only way to learn where one's families came from is to follow them back generation by generation. Before the internet people wrote letters and traveled. They spent vacations in libraries, courthouses, and cemeteries across the nation and across the pond. Of course back then postage and travel expenses were free ... not.

Ancestry.com gives a free trial that lasts for about a month or something, I did that, spoke to someone and now know all the way back to my viking scandanavian royalty family lol widh the wealth stayed with the knowledge

well,i am a member of ancestry .com and i have learned alot from using their serves.

however talk to family members and than start writing to newspapers for obits and so on.

check family bibles,they sometimes have some wonderful information available.

i have been a little lucky my mother is still living and helps me out alot with some information on her side,but i have learned that you must ask questions,post for free on ancestry.com i believe that is still availabe to you.

on my father's side,he died in 1975 and with what little information my mother knew i have had to search alot,i found someone working on my father's tree,who is related by marriage,so began a long journey.

check out library books,you'd be surprised what you can learn about your family's name and lineage in them.

i hope this helps you.

tracey

Perhaps you can simply look it up on the web to find someting. Just like on regular search engines.

ask your surviving elders and then go to the local libraries and archives to look information up.

try google, type in your name example: [last name] famliy tree

like... Smith famliy tree

or something close to that?

=]

your family . . . parents . . . grandparent . . . any1 who knows your family that well . . .