Genealogy and Free Internet Web Site Resources to Find Your Ancestors

Ever wondered where your ancestors lived? How they lived? What they did and how many children they had? For many the answer is yes, but for others the thought of the time involved and the cost of the research has kept alot of people away from this popular hobby , especially in these bad economic times.

Not any more here is a list of Web sites you can find records for free.

To start you will need to know where your ancestors lived, what town, county and state. This can be easily found on US Census Records that were taken from 1790-1930. You can find this information for free by going to the following website http://familysearch.org. Here you will also find the social security death index, and marriage records.

Another website of great interest is http://www.findagrave.com that has over 35 million grave transcriptions, type in your surname and it will give birth and death dates, location of the cemetery, and transcriptions. You can also search by cemetery name by County, this will show you all interments in the cemetery and can lead you to other related family members buried in the same cemetery, such as in law families. You may also find children who were born and died in between the census years. Sometimes living family members will also post obituaries.

Next is old county history books that were published by authors in the 1800's. There is a wealth of information that can be found. Go to http://www.archive.org and type in say Miami County Indiana, a list of books will display that are in pdf format, that can be read with acrobat reader. It will give you the year of the book, and what is included. Many of these books were biographical and have a complete history of their residents lives, including immigration details, marriages, their children who they married, what businesses they owned, etc. I have seen where the history can go back to the 1700's. You can find portraits done as sketches of the residents, sketches of their homes, search both married and maiden names here.

Make sure to download the pdf to your computer by hitting save. No time to read the whole 1096 page document? not a problem Acrobat Reader now has a search function that you can look by a single word and it will pull all documents in that book with say your surname Smith, that you can read at your convenience.

You can also find some family histories that were published by other family members, search by surname genealogy, and surname descendants to possibly locate a hidden family treasure.

They also have books on early marriages, estates, cemetery transcriptions and more right there at your finger tips.

If you don't have acrobat reader you can get it free at http://www.adobe.com

This is the first of many articles to come to help you find your ancestors for free or at low cost.