Find your family at free genealogy websites

Genealogy can be an expensive hobby, however with the free genealogy websites and resources on this lens you will save money! Some of the best are cemetery websites where you can find your ancestors.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with its Mormon Family Research Center is usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think about finding your ancestors. Thousands and thousands of records are stored there in Salt Lake City, Utah. and they are free

Although www.ancestry.com charges for memberships, many of its records are free. Check them often.

New players keep popping up such as Footnote, Vital Records, Cindi's List, Olive Tree Genealogy, USGenWeb, Immigration Transcribers, etc and many states have free records on-line.

www.rootsweb.ancestry.com offers many lists and message boards as well as genealogy sites for free.

Just for fun, google your name, a city or country and see what you find for free. www.gutenberg.org has 27000 books free covering various countries.

Google books are free, too. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format.

You probably think your family is not in a book, but many counties and states have written histories. Family members may have already written a book about your early ancestors.

Be friendly and talk with everyone you can, in courthouses for example. I found a cousin just by answering his question about who I was looking for. Cousins share grandparents.

I and thousands of other volunteers have been putting the Mormon Church records on-line. They are free to search at www.search.labs.familysearch.org
if you are a volunteer.

DO volunteer (it's easy) and then use the free site and you may find your whole family.

My group leader sent an e-mail: We can still use more help. If you have friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers, schoolmates, etc. who may be interested, tell them about the project and invite them to participate.

He says: "You can contact me on their behalf or ask them to contact me by e-mail" (mrhynard@sbcglobal.net) . "Or if you prefer, send me their contact information and I will contact them for you. Whatever works."

Most of our ancestors immigrated to this country from all over the world. Ellis Island and Castle Garden records are free to search.

All the states in the United States have records online. Just type them in and see what you can find.

All genealogists have a "brick wall ancestor." They are the ones who must have been dropped from an alien space craft. If you are really stuck, contact me and I might be able to help.