service gives you the opportunity to trace your personal ancestry along

your mother’s line, looking back some 150,000 years. Or you can choose

our DNA Father service to explore your ancestral lineage on your father’s

side of the family.

Family Search
Search the Family History Library’s database, which contains millions of names from thousands of family trees.

GenCircles
Searching the global tree and viewing results is free to everyone. In addition to first and last names, the database is searchable by dates and places of birth, baptism, marriage, death, and burial, as well as by the names of an individual’s father, mother and spouse.

GeneaNet

A database that indexes all the world’s genealogical resources, whether Net-based or not and whether free or fee-paying.

Free On Ancestry
A directory of all the FREE records and resources available on Ancestry.com.

Ancestor Hunt
Index of Free Genealogy Search Engines

Find Your Family Tree
A free genealogy web site designed to help you find missing branches of your family tree using Pedigree Resource File (PRF), a rapidly expanding collection of family trees submitted by people worldwide to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

GenealogyBuff.com
Search for your surname in dozens of family history databases with one click. Though you still have to visit each site to see the results (or find out your search came up empty), GenealogyBuff.com can be a good starting point for online research.

USGenWeb
The USGenWeb is one of the premier sites for US researchers. Here you’ll find Web pages for every US state and county.

AncestralFindings
AncestralFindings may not own every database you’re interested in, but its collection is impressive. Holdings include CD-ROM records of births, deaths, marriages, census indexes, land records, passenger lists, immigrations and Genealogy.com’s entire World Family Tree collection.

I am assuming your family is in the U.S. If it isn’t then disregard my answer.

First, ancestry.com does have a 14 day free trial-BUT you must cancel before the end of 14 days or they will charge your credit card. Also, don’t be suprised if they ask you to put your cancellation in writing and fax it to them. I have had friends tell me that they had to do it this way to cancel.

Here is a list of some of the free ones.
-This is a good one that is free. It is run by Ancestry.com but shouldn’t be confused with Ancestry.com- the pay site.

website for the Church of the Later Day Saints.
This is a site that is full of individual message boards. You can search and post by last name, state, country, or county. This is a great one. Simply post your question on the respective board, and when people answer you will get a notification on your E-mail. I have had a LOT of success on GenForum.

I must say, however, that a good genealogy query, doesn’t just say. ” I need information on John Smith” Try to provide as many dates, places, and details as possible. One little thing can make the difference as to the answer you get.

a good query has

1) the persons name
2) all of the biographical information you know to date and
3) asks a specific question

The reason it is so specific is because people won’t waste your time and theirs telling you what you already know. Also, by providing ALL of your known information (for example, the childrens names) it gives people alternate people to research to help arrive at your answer.
-When you get to the main page, you can get to the state and individual locality pages by clicking on the appropriate links. Keep in mind that some towns are going to have more information than some smaller obscure towns. It all depends on what kinds of volunteers contribute information to their sites. Genealogy is very much a hobby that depends on people.

Check your LOCAL LIBRARY. Many libraries have subscriptions to Ancestry.com or hertiage quest that you can Access from home with your library card number. Heritage Quest is geared mostly toward the US records.
or These are cemetery sites that have grown by leaps and bounds.
…

This is the link to the Social Security Death index. This is a very helpful resource to finding death dates of people who died in recent years (since about the 60’s)

If your family immigrated to the US in the last 100-125 years you can try
This one is cool because you can actually have a look at the ships manifests!!

Good luck in your search. It is a satisfying and rewarding hobby with lots of twist and turns. Remember, you are not going to just find your entire genealogy in one search. It is an ongoing puzzle. I tell people, if you can find one thing every time you are searching, you are doing GREAT. If you find any more than that at any given time you are LUCKY!! Blessings.

Try any of these:

Task 1: Talk to people
Ask family about the family. Record everything, even the doubtful stories grandma used to tell!!! there’s maybe a shred of truth behind these tales that got embellished over the years/generations. Ask parents about their parents & grandparents… do the same with your grandparents if they are still around (or their siblings). I can’t stress enough how important this is, as census & church records will never give you the kind of personal information you can get from people who actually KNEW the ancestors you never met.

I don’t know what country you’re researching… in the US, I believe you can access census records as late as 1930, which will include many people’s grandparents (perhaps great grandparents if you’re pretty young). You can get Canadian censuses for 1911. In the UK, you can’t access any censuses later than 1901 (1911 due online sometime on or after 2011).

Basically, you’re looking for family stories/documents that will take you back to ancestors born BEFORE the date of the available census in the relevant country. You then need to access these census returns to find your relative. This will show the household they lived in, and hopefully this will include their parents. You then work back through the census returns searching for each new family member found (you will also ned to access other records, particularly the marriage index, which will provide maiden names of females).

It’s a big task, but it becomes easier with practice.

start by asking you parents, and grandparnts. you could get some good info just by doing that. Then go tothe liabrary. type in some names and get the petagree chart.

Do a search on the web, everyone has a cousin that they haven’t seen in years who has done some of the research already. in a search engine type in
(your last name)+genealogy
you can also try
(your last name)+family
Good Luck

Begin by understanding that your private information (parents, etc) is confidential… meaning, no website should be able to give you that. What is trustworthy is your own personal documentation.. ie your birth certificate; your parents; grandparents, etc. Info on living persons should never be online.
Once you have worked from the PRESENT backwards.. and now have names/dates/places for (say) 8 of the gr grandparents, you can work to locate valid records on them. The 1930 census is open for research.. however, the one place with all census records is ancestry.com. It is not free.. it is worth the $$. You can get a great deal of info from those records (your library often offers it free to patrons).
Knowledge of HOW TO is free… but genealogy itself isn’t. It’s up to you as to how much you really think the knowledge is worth. My advice (many yrs experience) is to make the priority of research to be finding your ancestors, not necessarily websites, and not necessarily free.

This is where I started………….

and I am still using it.