Find Your Family Tree Online: Tips For Using Genealogy Archives

To find your family tree online does not necessarily mean that you can open a link or a URL and find a family tree with all your ancestors and relatives sitting in it (although this could happen if someone in your family has already created and put your family tree online), or open a database that has all the names of the people who came before you in your family, but you can find your family tree online if you look in certain places on the Internet. You will have to piece together the information that you find.


Old data was kept in paper form and there are places where these records are kept. These are usually quite extensive records and much of this information has now been transcribed into electronic format and stored online.


What you need to do is find the sources that are relevant to the people whom you are searching for and starting from there you can gather a whole lot of new information. Any information that you find will help you build up your bank of family data that you can put online for other people in your family to find. Let’s see some of the places you can look for family tree archives that will help you find your family tree online:

The obituaries

These family tree archives are a rich source of information. If you can find out the name of a relative who died, even in the recent past and then get the death notice that was put up for that person, you will likely find that it contains the name of his or her parents, siblings, children and other close relatives. You are now gathering names and some of the names you get may be of deceased relatives, but that doesn’t matter; they are leads. You are already starting to know who was related to whom and what the relationship was.

Death Indexes

They are not commonly available in all places, but if you know a relative who lived in a place that has a death index already created, it is worthwhile to have a look at how they were indexed and what kind of information was recorded. It may be posted online.

Cemetery records

Today, you can find your family tree online, but do you know in the past, people would travel far and wide to look in cemeteries where they suspected that relatives might have been buried? The headstones would usually give information on dates of birth and death and sometimes the parents of the deceased. These records are now available online; there are many cemeteries that have put up records of who they have buried and looking at this will give you more information.

Census records

In most censuses, people are required to fill out names of immediate family members and fortunately, a lot of census statistics are available online. You need to know what the name of your relative was and where they lived and then Google for the census for that particular place. Results will give you names of entire families sometimes.

Genealogical databases

These are the richest source of information yet for you to find your family tree online. They contain family tree archives and are extensive records that have been kept over the years with names, births, deaths and marriages and you will usually find a lot of information here.
To find your family tree online , you do need to start with some information; have names (first and last) and if you can, when they were born or when they died. Finding even just one person could lead you to a whole lot of others and you can now start to put together the pieces of your family’s history and start to write your genealogy.


Margaret Ravenscroft has been a genealogist for over 20 years and has traced her family back to medieval times. If you have found this article helpful, visit Find Your Family Tree Online to discover more. Click Here for your FREE Minicourse http://www.genealogyandfamilytrees.com