How to Search for Your Ancestors and Climb Your Family Tree

Some of the best genealogical tools available to family history researchers are you can find by reviewing one of your ancestor's applications for a social.
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Visit your public library and historical society where you are likely to find a wealth of local information about your ancestors: There are many websites and genealogical societies devoted to specific locations, surnames, and religious or ethnic groups.

Climb Your Family Tree - Genealogy Blog and Family History Resources

Many sites offer forums where you can post questions to other researchers. You may even be able to identify other researchers who have done a great deal of work on some branch of your family tree. If you do enough research you might find that you actually are related to Marco Polo. American State, County, and Town Sources.

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Image used under Creative Commons license. Skip to main content. Take for example grandma's engagement or wedding ring. If you look at the hallmark, you will have the approximate date it took place.

If the hallmark has been worn off you may be able to date the piece by the fashion of the piece. Old photographs can make valuable pieces of evidence when trying to find clues. They can narrow the time frame down and give you an idea of which generation they come from. For example, a cabinet print is from the middle or late 's, and postcards give clues with their printing and often the stamp.


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Fashion is also a big giveaway to the era in which a photograph was taken. And a three inch shirt collar is from ," said super sleuth Sue Stafford. Birth certificates are perhaps the easiest and most common form of information people use to trace their ancestors.

References for Researching

They have been available from to the present day although the earlier certificates were in a different format. So check the sub district and the registration destrict. If you want to find the correct registry office, look at the old certificate and at the bottom it will have the subdistrict and a place name.

How to Make a Family Tree

Then simply call the local registry office and ask them for the address of the area that deals with the district you are looking for. A full birth certificate will tell you: You need the mother's maiden name and father's name to get a copy of their marriage certificate if you want to research further back. Full copies of birth certificates can be obtained from most registry offices.

Home Explore the BBC. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. It even might mean going to libraries to see what services are offered there. Expanding how we search for the relatives on our family tree can help us pluck out the leaves that might not belong and graft in the branches that do.

Do you remember an era when you did source citations by hand or in a word processor, making sure you got all the dots and periods and dates and parentheses in the right places? Thanks to modern technology, the process is far less frustrating and tedious, but it should still be done.

With many sites, such as Ancestry , a source citation is created each time you find a record and save it to your family tree. This gives those coming to investigate your tree later on an explanation of why you placed the individual where you did.

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Sometimes you have conflicting evidence: This step may be where you run into brick walls. You have to really go through your evidence and ask yourself if you have enough information to move on to the next ancestor. If not, start back to step one.