Does anyone know how to find out about your ancestors online for free?

You can find out limited info online for free. However, the more in-depth you want to get, the more money or time you'll have to spend. You'll also have to be willing to do some leg work and get off the web. Libraries and government offices (city, county, & state) are all great resources. You can access public records for births, marriages, etc. Sometimes these are free or have a small fee.

The Mormon Church has an extensive network of genealogy records as it is considered important to their faith. And this is not just records on Mormons. I don't know exactly how it works, but they do allow the public to access some of their records. I don't know if it's free either, so check with your local LDS church on how it works.

Also, as someone said before, the best place to start is with your relatives. Contact everybody you're related to! You'll be surprised to learn who knows what. Everyone has a different piece of the puzzle. Maybe Aunt Bertha is the only one who remembers that Great Grandma Margaret was born in Scotland. And Uncle Morty has a picture of his Great-Uncle from the Civil War. You'll learn a lot and get to closer to your living family.

One final note, Ancestry.com is expensive, but they are a tremendous resource. You need to weigh their cost against the value of the time you'll be spending looking things up on your own. I would suggest doing some basic research yourself, then come up with a list of "gaps" you need filled. Then you could buy a short-term membership to Ancestry and use it to fill in as many of those gaps as possible.

Good luck to you! It will be a rewarding journey!

Kiki

Before you rush to the internet and start looking for websites to find your ancestors.

Do your groundwork first or you just won't know who you are looking for, where they are from and if who you do find are your ancestors or not. Read this first, http://familytimeline.webs.com/recordsinyourownhom... then.....

Collect all the information you have in your own home and in your living relations homes is the first place to start , its free and it will encourage your family to look for more and help you, it teaches you the principles and good habit of record research and the details you can find on records while there are still people alive to ask further questions of, which helps you later on as you are familiar with records, understand what can be found on them, you understand the importance of citing your research to prove what you have found and can generally see very clearly the very basic mistakes/errors that many people make by only trusting online resources, especially when one mistake can mean you are no longer researching your family.

These records are primary information, so it is more likely to be correct and you will achieve an impressive start with your family tree, also learn/hear a lot about your family which will help you when you do start looking at records in the Records Office or on Internet cited databases. These are your best resources by far living people and the records they hold, FREE, primary and will get you back 3-5 generations of proved, cited ancestry which is a great foundation for your research.

Not sure what you mean by "the census website". If you are not back to people who were alive in 1930, the census won't help you. I am assuming you are in the U.S. Try Familysearch.org and finagrave.com. Also, you need to learn basic research for genealogy. Stay tuned here, and others will come on to guide you, if you are really interested. We are talking about a serious, lifetime hobby here, not something you can play with for an hour or two, and have all your relatives and ancestors already researched for you.

A stock answer:

There are tens of thousands of free websites useful to genealogists. Resources will vary depending on where and when your ancestor lived, what records they left behind, and what is available for that place/time. Not everything is online and/or free. If you get to a point where you have to pay to move forward on a line, set it aside and work another line for spell. New records may come available or you may find it's worth paying for later.

A few hints for making good use of resources: Avoid user-submitted or prepared trees/pedigrees except where they have sources cited, and go to the sources. Indexes and transcriptions are better than trees but still likely to have more errors. Use these to get you to the original source. Try to find and work with original documents or images as exclusively as possible. Understanding how each type of record was collected and prepared and what that means is an invaluable tool for assessing the information.

Some helpful starting places:

http://www.cyndislist.com/ (START with How To and Genealogical Standards and Guidelines)

https://www.familysearch.org/

http://www.deathindexes.com/

http://www.censusfinder.com/

http://www.findagrave.com/

Here -- Many of us have resources or knowledge specific to certain documents, times, places, and groups.

Google -- Look for local libraries, archives, agencies, and GenWebs, or websites similar to above for your ancestor's country.

Offline -- Libraries, archives, museums, genealogical societies, Family History Centers (operated by the Mormons), etc. BIG note: FHCs and some libraries have free access to some of the paid subscription sites like Ancestry.

Disclaimer: A good foundation is built by following a good research process. No website will be particularly helpful if you can't get back to a time where records are available to the public (generally to a dead ancestor or 70-100 years).

1. Interview your living relatives.

2. Examine your documents and those of relatives that will allow it.

3. Prepare for research by learning about basic genealogy, genealogy specific to your known ancestors.

4. Organize your data. Free software is available.

5. Research one document at time for one generation at a time, one ancestor at a time.

You can search immigration archives at Ellis Island and Castle Garden, as well as other records at stevenmorse.org

However the bulk of the records for your family can probably easily be viewed at Ancestry.com

There's a fee but I it's worth it.

I have found quite a lot of new information on rootsweb.com in just a few minutes. I went from knowing my grandparents names to knowing back to great great grandparents on one side of my family. And absolutely nothing about the other side. So it is hit and miss.

Ancestry.com is okay. For free there's still a lot of features, but if you do pay, more features are unlocked.

ask your family? go visit the oldest members of your family check out their photo albums?