How do I find my ancestors?

Question

I want to find out about my ancestors and who they were, but I don't really know any names. I know my mother's name, father's name, maternal grandparents' names, and my maternal great-grandmother's name. Where do I go from here to find my ancestors?

Answer 1

Go to:

http://www.ancestry.com

http://www.genealogy.com

http://www.genealogy.org

http://genforum.genealogy.com

http://www.rootsweb.com

http://www.cyndislist.com

http://www.familytreeconnection.com

http://www.familytreelegends.com

http://www.familysearch.org

http://www.gedlink.com

http://www.census.gov

http://www.onegreatfamily.com

http://www.heirlines.com

http://www.genhomepage.com

http://www.usgenforum.org

Answer 2

The Internet is a good place to find some research ideas, but so many indexes have errors, and so many of the "facts" people post are wrong, that you should not rely on the Internet alone.
Ask any living relatives for all the details they can recall. Then, get copies of your own birth certificate, your parents' marriage certificate, their birth certificates, and so on. For dead relatives, collect death certificates and obituaries as well.
Always work BACKWARDS. If you know your grandparents' names, then find THEIR parents' names from their birth or marriage records. NEVER try to link someone with the same surname you think "must" be related, but who is not named in the records you have and connected to the family you already know about. I know of cases of people who have wasted 20 years of research doing that, then found out they were on the wrong path!
Look for forums and mailing lists devoted to the names and places you are interested in, and ask for help there. But, never trust any information you find on the Internet that can't be backed up by an actual, off the Internet, record. A lot of the LDS records contain errors; so do the indexes at Ancestry, and so on...

Answer 3

The web sites below are free, ancestry is not free. If you know your great grandmother's maiden name that would be a good start to enter it in rootsweb. Latter Day Saints (lds) has loads of info and usgenweb you can search by state and county.
I use ancestry at the library where I live, as long as I have my library card it is free. I do most of my research at the library, they have books for all states, microfilm for Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Tennessee. Newspapers are on microfilm. You might try your local library to see if they have a genealogy department, the one I go to just had genealogy classes last week which are very helpful. Been researching over a year, so you can contact me because I have hand-outs with alot of info with other places to look.

Answer 4

Look out for some contemporary,if distant, relatives of your grandma. They may be able to give some more details. Try to access the townspeoples list of the place where the grand ones resided and see if you can get any trace.If you get some inkling of where they came from you can extend the search to those places. This is going to be a long-drawn out and sometimes frustrating process. But have you not beard the tale of Californian whose genes shows that he was a diret descendant of Chengi Khan-You can write letters to newspapers requesting for help.

Answer 5

Assuming you're not looking for an answer like "Adam & Eve" or Neanderthal man, substitute the term father or mother for the term ancestor. So you have: father's, father = grandfather father's, father's, father = great grandfather father's, father's, father's, father = great great grandfather etc. Each generation takes you back ~20 years. I find the maternal side more difficult to track simply because of the name changes. Availability of records varies greatly by country. For the record, when I use the term ancestors, I'm referring to all of them.

Answer 6

There are 30 lessons on
http://rwguide.rootsweb.com/

You start by asking living people who their parents, aunts and uncles were. You find parents of dead people through birth, death and marriage records. The US Census helps, if your individuals were in the US from 1850 - 1930. Before then they just list the head of household, and after that they aren't public yet.

Answer 7

you can start at ancestry.com. they can actually help a lot, depending on what countries you and your ancestors are from. some of their services are free, some cost....and some of the things that cost can be obtained for free elsewhere. the library is always free though. ask a reference librarian to help you get started with your geneaology. some cities have geneaology guilds also.

Answer 8

Ask your parents about their brothers and sisters,aunts and uncles, about their grand parents. Write to city halls where they lived for copies of marriage licenses and birth certificates to find out who your grand parents mom and dad were, and work backwards.

Answer 9

www.haynes.co.uk publish a manual that takes you through the process of tracking down your ancestors. There is also a number of CD-ROM's available, www.dreamdirect.co.uk sell a number of them.

Answer 10

The Mormons have a great database

Answer 11

try looking in the internet, i tried that and by the looks of it my great great grand father was a very famous Spanish general.