Free Genealogy Databases: How to Find Your Ancestors for Free

Free genealogy databases are available to us today and these have vast amounts of information on people who lived before us. You need to make good use of these resources because they can be an invaluable source of information for you when you are building a family tree. You are going to need historical information on members of your family that lived way back and using these free resources is an excellent way to get your genealogy project started.



These databases were started mainly by the Church of Latter Day Saints, the church of the Mormons. The Mormon tradition required, from a long time ago, that any saving rites that were performed on a person in a church had to be recorded. These included baptisms, marriages, deaths and other rites of passage that they had. From these rites came a huge database, and eventually the Church sponsored a project to put these databases online.



Because the Mormons interacted and married from different communities as well as welcomed new members in their church, the databases have information that’s far reaching. There are 4 main databases that have come to be relied on heavily as a source of accurate information.



This article will give you information about them.

RootsWeb

This database is strongly focused on Europe and the United States and it is quite useful because you can find all kinds of interesting information here. More than just names of people’s births and deaths and marriages, you will find records of divorces, voter records, cemetery records, records of people who were lost in war and many others. It has proved to be instrumental in reuniting families that got separated in Europe in the 2nd world war. There are many international institutions concerned with reuniting people who continue to supply it with data so that it is constantly up to date with any information that they can find.

FamilySearch

This one is hosted by the Mormon Church as well, and it is rather simple to use. All it needs is a person’s full names: the first middle and last, and you will find any available information on that person. The database will also require the event you are looking for, say a birth or a death, so that your search string will look something like "Charles Smith Peterson Death". Since it requires this kind of detail, if you plan to use it, you need to arm yourself in advance with all the details that will be required for a successful search.

It has one major difference from regular genealogical databases: it covers Hispanics, Jews and African-Americans.

Olive Tree Genealogy

This one was created to provide a most basic genealogical search database. It has information on people from many different countries, and it goes on to include displaced persons, orphans, victims of war and other such categories that are not usually so easy to find in other genealogical databases. It’s a good place to look if you are looking for people who have been missing for years but whose death does not appear to have been recorded anywhere.

GeneaLinks

This is a vast online record of marriages and all you need is to have the surname and the location. The great thing about it is that it’s connected to other smaller databases so that by simply putting in a search string, it will search through as many databases as it has to get you results. It has records of about 30,000 records in the US alone.

If you are researching your family’s genealogy or creating your own family tree, your best bet for information, other than relatives, is to make use of these free genealogy databases. All you need to know before you select one of these databases is the details that they will require you to put in so that you can make a search.



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 Free Genealogy Databases to learn more. Click Here for your FREE Minicourse http://www.genealogyandfamilytrees.com