Free Online Ancestry Searches

I have been working on my Family Tree for several years and have found several very useful websites that offers free ancestry searches. Below is my 3 favorite ones that I use a lot.

1. www.olivetreegenealogy.com/index.shtml

This one offers a beginner's guide to building your family tree which is a handy outline of the best way to start finding your ancestors. The site contains over 20 areas of information such as military muster rolls, passenger lists, Almshouse records and orphan records. They have links to the Social Security Death index which is the best place to find the last residence of a deceased ancestor.

2. www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp

This is also a good place for gathering information on your ancestors. It offers a search engine that searches multiple data bases and also offers down-loadable programs that helps you organize and build your family tree from your desktop. Family Search services are provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

3. www.myheritage.com/

My Heritage is my favorite family tree site of them all. It lets you download a small program that you use to build your tree with. Each time you save your work, it is uploaded to the website. The best feature of My Heritage is that it will notify you by email if any ancestor in your family tree matches an ancestor in anyone else's family tree. It really works!! I was notified of a family tree that contained my husband's name and found that someone in his ex-wife's family had connected it to him and my step-sons through her! It really is a small world when you start tracing your linage!

**If you are serious about genealogy, I'd suggest taking the time to submit your family tree to as many free websites as you can. You never know when an ancestor from another branch of your family tree might be building their family tree and connect to you in the middle!