Family Trees and where to look?

Question

What is the best website to find family history. My family's name is Moser and we are from mid Missouri area.

Answer 1

you could go to ancestry.com. they have a lot of information

Answer 2

There are no magic websites out there free or paid. Each site is info that other researchers have submitted. Most of which has not been documented, some copied from other researchers and a whole lots of mess.

I suggest you start with your family. Make copies of their birth, death, marriage certificates. Just saved yourself a bunch of money right there. Then start from there working backward.

I suggest a book called unpuzzling your past by Emily Croom. It takes you step by step and worth its weight in gold. It's only about $19. She is a stop researcher and shares with her readers.

Anything you find online ask the submitter if they have documents and would they share. If they don't have documents don't use the material until you prove it.

Check your local librarys homepage to see if they subscribe to ancestry and heritagequest. If they do you can use ancestry at the library for free and heritage quest at home with your library card. Heritagequest has the census and they hold a wealth of information. Also try your local LDS center they have tons of info too. Again make sure you document anything you find.

good luck on your quest

Answer 3

If you are looking for a complete tree, it usually means someone has done the work. Or.. with all respect to nothingusefull... many of the trees online with kazillions of persons are NOT input one by one, but have taken other files from online and merged them. Too many persons are impressed with how many names they collect and don't care about the quality.
In fact, there are thousands of sites online where you can find your ancestors, but it is more often fact by fact, and at different locations. I suggest www. cyndislist.com as the main "encyclopedia" of genealogy resources, which will lead to many of the other popular sites. The more sites you use, the better the odds of finding as much data as possible.
There is a beginner section with tutorials on how to get the process going.
One of my personal lines happens to be a Carl Moser, who md Rosa Winninger from Joplin, MO. He was born in Austria, where I understand the Moser name is very common. He immigrated with a relative (name unk). Your email is not enabled, so I cannot reach you off the board. Please drop me a note!

Answer 4

There are many websites on the web, but family trees on any website, free or paid, must be viewed very cautiously. They are submitted by folks like you and me and mostly not documented or poorly documented. Even when you see the same information from many different submitters, that is no guarantee it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying. Use the information as clues as to where to get the documentation, not as fact.

Family History without records to back it up is worthless.

First of all start with your living family and get as much information from them as possible, particularly your senior members. Tape them if they will let you. It might turn out they are confused on some things but what might seem to be insignificant story telling might be very significant.

Go to your public library and find out what all they have. They might have a subscription to Ancestry.Com you can use.
Ancestry.Com has lots of records and seems to be getting more all the time. They have all the U.S.censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.

Still be very careful about taking as fact what has been submitted in family trees on their website.

A Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints(Mormon) Church has records on people all over the world, not just Mormons.
In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection. Their Family History Centers can order microfilm for you to view at a nominal fee. Just call your nearest Mormon Church and find out if they have a Family History Center and if so the hours they are open for the general public.

I have never had them to try and convert me or send their missionaries by to ring my doorbell. I haven't heard that they have done so to anyone else either.

Vital Records are important, Birth, Marriage and Death. Usually they will give names of parents. The Death Certificate and the application for a social security number that I have seen gives the names of both parents including mother's maiden name and their places of birth. Two free sites, Rootsweb and FamilySearch.org(LDS site) both have the Social Security Death Index. If a person was drawing social security at time of death and on their OWN social security number, you will probably find them on it. You just need their name as it was listed with social security OR their Social Security number. You don't need both even though there is a space for both.

Each state has its own laws regarding who and when a person can obtain birth and death records. In Texas, if you were not immediate family, you use to have to wait 50 years after a person was born to get a birth certificate on someone. Now it is 75.
States are clamping down due to identity theft.

Also governing bodies(state, county, city) in a lot of states did not start recording vital information until the first quarter of the 20th century. Not every state started at the same time and still once they did a lot of people who were born at home or died at home did not get recorded. My own parents born in 1907 and 1908 both had to get a delayed birth certificate in order to get social security benefits, even though the state of Texas started recording the info beginning in 1903.

Before records were being recorded by state, county or city, you will need to turn to Church Records, Baptisms, First Communion, Confirmation, Marriages and Deaths. These usually have parent information including mother's maiden name.

Good Luck!

Answer 5

Start with your parents, and being your own tree going back to the oldest living relatives. Don't forget Great Grand Aunts/Uncles, and their spouses. Ask if anyone else is interested in family history. Find out where the pictures are and the special items of interest.

Then with this info you can search some of the many free sites, or go to the library and use Ancestry for free, or buy an Ancestry membership. Since you seem new, I will explain this a bit.

The Latter Day Saints basically belive that the way to salvation for person who passed away who was not sealed in the LDS church is to have someone living, a descendent, do this specially for them, sort of like an invitation. LDS belives in the spirit world, found in the Bible, as a place we go to after death before judgement day. So in this spirit world we can after our death be invited into the kingdom of God. While I don't prescribe to this belief, thank God for the Mormons.

Because the LDS has the most substantial and well funded genealogy resources in the world, and these resources stretch world wide. The main LDS library is in Salt Lake City Utah but most large cities have an LDS family history room or library where you can request microfiche. There is infinetly more on microfiche than on computer right now, and that says a lot.

LDS also operates most, like 70% of the websites you'll find on family trees. Like Rootsweb, Ancestry, and many many more I don't use. LDS has free sites, which are helpful, and charge sites which have an annual fee. The premier site is Ancestry.com, and most libraries subscribe to a library version of Ancestry. Ancestry is, in my opinion, very helpful for a new researcher. But most prefer not to spend money and this is up to you. Ancestry also has a great family tree software program that lets you plug in your relatives, then search, add documents, pics, data, then make books, and other products. The software online is quite developed and does continuous active searches for new data on relatives as you are looking at their screen. So on Monday if you search and add everything new for your Great Great Grand Father, then on tuesday look at his file, you'll find a little flage letting you know their might be new info. Info from one file can be added to another, if it's the same data as well easily. So I like Ancestry, but on YA most users recommend free sites also run by LDS.

The reason I mention this is because it's not exactly so easy to reinvent the wheel once you start. So it's wise to either commit to free software and free sites, or commit to a pay service but choose one way and one way only, with back ups. I started free, then went to Family Tree Maker (a software name) by LDS, and then shifted to Ancestry online services to make my family tree. While they do work together--not exactly. So I wish I had started with the online version, it would have saved me a lot of time and given me better continuity and consistency.

As you search you'll find that you'll be able to identify well resaearched lines, and other lines that simply stop early on. I spend most of my time reseraching these dead end short lines. This will give you expeience before you tackle the pre-researced, and often incorrect, long line trees you'll get. Good news is that as you go further back in US genealogy, the more and more info you can get from other researchers. Bad news is that 90% of this really good research is not easily available online. So eventually later, when you're ready you can then go down your longer lines to verify, confirm, and gather source info. YOu'lll also get a lot more interesting facts as you go that you will enjoy from other resaerch. There are tons of books, and journals and socities, that you can get this info from as you learn how to source your info.

But again, it all starts with you and your parents. Go back as far as you can. Then you can plug this in and hopefully using a site you can find even more and more ancestors and tree links. Then resarch the short lines. If that doesn't discourage you, you'll eventually go onto longer and longer lines.

Answer 6

Shirley T, #2, deserves best answer beause she pasted first, but all of us seem to have pasted our standards, so here is mine. I would point out that unless your family is Native American and incestuous, you have at least 7 other surnames and they were east of Missouri before 1800 - 1850. RWWC (Below) has 1,160 entries for surname = Moser and Birthplace = MO. That site works best when you use the postal abbreviations for states.

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This is a text file I paste to questions like yours. People ask similar questions 3 - 14 times a day here. You get a long, detailed answer, I don't get finger cramps. It is long because there are over 400,000 free genealogy sites.

It is also long because researching your family tree is as hard as writing a term paper in a History class. You don't have to be a rocket scientist, but you won't do it with five clicks. I could tell you everything I know in 30 minutes, but not 3. The fact you have to do research stops nine out of ten teens and many adults.

If you didn't mention a country, we can't tell if you are in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. I'm in the USA and my links are for it. If you are not, please edit your question to add a country. Genealogists from the UK answer posts here too. They are more experienced and more intelligent than I am. I'm better looking and my jokes are better.

The really good stuff is in your parents' and grandparents' memories. No web site is going to tell you how your great grandparents decorated the Christmas tree with ornaments cut from tin foil during the depression, how Great Uncle Elmer wooed his wife with a banjo, or how Uncle John paid his way through college in the 1960's by smuggling herbs. Talk to your living relatives before it is too late.

You won't find living people on genealogy sites. Don't look for yourself or your parents.

So much for the warnings. Here are some links. These are large and free. Many of them have subtle ads for Ancestry.com in them - ads that ask for a name, then offer a trial subscription. Watch out for those advertisements.

If you try the links and don't find anyone, go to

http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html

It repeats each link, but it has a whole paragraph of tips and instructions for each one.


http://www.cyndislist.com
Cyndi's List has over 250,000 sites.

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp
The Mormon's mega-site.

http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi
RootsWeb World Connect. The links at the top are advertisements. They mislead beginners. Ignore them and scroll down.

http://www.rootsweb.com/
RootsWeb Home.
This is the biggest free (genealogy) site in the world.

http://www.ancestry.com
Ancestry has some free data and some you have to pay for.

http://www.usgenweb.net
US Gen Web. Click on a state. Find a link that says "County".

http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/default.aspx?
Surname meanings and origins, one of Ancestry's free pages.

http://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi"
Social Security Death Index. Click on "Advanced". Women are under their married names. They are under their maiden names in most other sites.

http://find.person.superpages.com/
USA Phone book, for looking up distant cousins.

http://vitals.rootsweb.com/ca/death/search.cgi
California Death Index, 1940 - 1997.

http://www.genforum.com
GenForum has surname, state and county boards.

http://boards.ancestry.com/
Ancestry has surname, state and county boards too. They are free.

Read
http://www.tedpack.org/goodpost.html
before you post on either one.

Read the paragraphs about query boards on
http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html
before you search them.

http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl
Roots Web Mailing List Archives.

Read
http://www.tedpack.org/maillist.html
if genealogy mailing lists are new to you.

Off the Internet, some public libraries have census image subscriptions. Many Family History Centers do too. FHC's are small rooms in Mormon churches. They welcome anyone interested in genealogy, not just fellow Mormons. They have resources on CD's and volunteers who are friendly. They don't try to convert you; in fact, they don't mention their religion unless you ask a question about it.

Answer 7

There is no one "best website". Overall, www.ancestry.com is considered best, but it DEPENDS upon the individual circumstances.
Start by asking any and all living relatives all the info they can provide. Check your local library. Ours has both ancestry.com and www.heritagequest.com, as well as books, periodicals and a volunteer who helps genealogy prospects.
As for other sites:
Free sites: there are several to choose from. Start with:
http://www.searchforancestors.com/...

http://www.censusrecords.net/?o_xid=2739...

http://www.usgenweb.com/

http://www.census.gov/

http://www.rootsweb.com/

http://www.ukgenweb.com/

http://www.archives.gov/

http://www.familysearch.org/

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/...

http://www.cyndislist.com/

Assuming they emigrated from Europe, start with Ellis Island and the Battery Conservancy sites:
http://www.ellisisland.org
http://www.castlegarden.org


For Scotland, check:
http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/


For ship’s passenger lists, try:
http://www.immigrantships.net/
www.cyndislist.com/ships.htm
www.geocities.com/Heartland/5978/Emigration.html
www.immigrantstips.net/
www.searchforancestors.com/passengerlists/
www.archives.gov/genealogy/immigration/passenger-arrival.html


For those with native American ancestry, try:
http://www.tribalpages.com/
http://www.cherokee-nc.com/geneology.php...
http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/herita...

Netherlanders: http://www.genlias.nl

For a fee, try a DNA test:
When you really want to know where your ancestors came from, try such sites as: www.familytreedna.com, dnatribes.com, dnaancestryproject.com, and, of course, the National Geographics Genotype program, https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/geno...
For Jewish ancestry, try:
www.israelgenealogy.com

For people from India, try:
http://www.fibis.org/

Have a look at these sites these are South African ones,
http://genealogy.about.com/od/south_afri...
http://www.rupert.net/~lkool/page2.html....
http://www.jewishgen.org/safrica/website...
http://southafricanfamilyhistory.wordpre...

Meaning of names:
http://www.winslowtree.com/surname-meani...

http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/f...

Here are some general sites with lists of African names:
http://www.swagga.com/fname.htm
http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/afr.php
http://www.familiesonlinemagazine.com/ba...

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/...

Military:
www.military.com
http://www.familymilitaryrecords.com/

http://www.archives.gov/veterans/militar...

http://websearch.about.com/od/peoplesear...

http://genealogy.about.com/b/2007/05/24/...

http://userdb.rootsweb.com/ww1/draft/sea...

Finding live people:
Two good places I use are www.zabasearch.com and www.peoplefinder.com

A lot of people claim that websites are not very accurate, as they are usersubmitted. True enough. But, I feel that any one who puts names/places dates of birth, marriage, death of more than 100,000 persons (some as high as millions) is NOT pulling a hoax. It would take MONTHS just to read all that info! Also, I have found that "official" (state issued) birth/marriage/death certificates, even in the 1900s, are not all that accurate.

Keep track of your sources; when possible, get at least 2 sources.