what are the best genealogy web sites? The ones without fees?
102961
Here are two websites that are quite popular.\n\nwww.rootsweb.com\n\nwww.cyndislist.com
611730
Go to a family tree geneology site.
284062
The links listed above are good but are pay services, as well as geneology.com. However, if you have all your info ready you can sign up for a 2 week free trial and get most all of your work done in that time...especially since you are not going back that far.\n\nI traced my fathers side back to the late 15th century this way. Real neat stuff but also very addictive so be careful. Also easy to get lead in a bad direction so double and triple check all your results before moving to the next generation.\n\nAlso, a decent free site is www.rootsweb.com. \n\nNewsgroups are an excellent resource as well but too complicated to explain here. Feel free to email me if you need help getting started.
412820
Cyndi's List has a lot of links to genealogy sites that might help you.  Here's the link: http://www.cyndislist.com/
63254
I don't think there are any that do it for free, but www.zabasearch.com can get you more information than you might expect(for free) and even more than that it you pay.
448404
have you tried the websites that trace back family trees and stuff?
655142
Yahoo Answers has a Genealogy category under "Arts & Humanities". Half of the questions there are inane. Most of the rest are either "What is the meaning of the {xyz} surname?" or "How do I find my family tree?".\n\nYou can't find your family tree without spending a month or two at it, unless you get REAL lucky. (For instance, an aunt has spent 30 years at it and has you in her tree.)\n\nYahoo! itself doesn't have any genealogy data.\n\nThe resolved Q in the Genealogy category have some links that will get you started, if you are still interested.
11076
This is tricky, but there are several places to look. SInce you want a free site, these might not do you a lick of good. (Paying for the service is almost guaranteed to get you results.) Okay - here you go:\n\nhttp://www.zabasearch.com/\n(Great for searching names for free.)\n\nhttp://people.yahoo.com/\n(Good for searching through Yahoo for people.)\n\nhttp://www.google.com/\n(Good to try looking.)\n\nhttp://www.myspace.com\n(Another good place to try.)
1050292
Have you tried http://www.ancestry.com ? Their 1881 census is free, I have seen a few people on the censuses that were in ships.
813082
I save this and paste it because the same questions come up a lot:\n\nWhat are good free sites for genealogy?\nDoes anyone know about the {surname} family?\nHow can I trace my family tree, for free?\n\nSometimes in the genealogy category, \nArts & Humanities -> Genealogy. \nSometimes elsewhere. The fourth time I typed in three of my favorite links I realized it would be better to make a good list and save it. Since this is a general answer, some of the paragraphs may not apply to you. If you search or browse the resolved questions in the Genealogy category, you can find more links from other people. \n\nTwo warnings:\n1) It takes time. Compiling a good family tree is like writing a term paper for a high school history class.  You have to do research.\n2) Most of the genealogy data on the web is about people born before 1900, to protect living people's privacy. You'll have to find your grandparents (or great grandparents) off the web. \n\nHere are some large free sites. \n\nhttp://www.cyndislist.com/\n(240,000+ links, all cross-indexed.)\nhttp://www.familysearch.com\n(Mormon's mega-site)\nhttp://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi\n(450,000,000+ entries, some excellent, some bad, most in between)\nhttp://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/default.aspx?ln=\nSurname meanings and origins; no specific individuals, but fun.\n\nThese are for the USA only. \n\nhttp://www.usgenweb.net/\n(Subdivided into state sites, which all have county sites.)\n(Canada has a Canadian Gen Web, with sites for each province.)\nhttp://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi\n(Social Security Death index - click on "Advanced".)\nhttp://find.person.superpages.com/\n(US Phone book, for looking up distant cousins)\n\nThese two are for the UK & Ireland only:\nhttp://www.genuki.org.uk\nhttp://www.freebmd.org.uk/\n\n\nIf you get serious, you should probably buy a genealogy program. I like Roots Magic. Family Tree Maker is very popular. Both are $29 in the USA, but you can sometimes find old versions in discount bins at software stores.\n\nhttp://www.tedpack.org/begingen.html\nhas some tips for beginners.
218532
I maintain the site for my church, and I subscribe to the mailing list for web keepers in my denomination. We discuss this all the time.\n\nI also do genealogy as a hobby. I often tell people the best web page I ever saw had a 25% grey background and nothing but line after line of black courier text. It was  a transcription of the 1850 census for Monroe County VA (Now WV) with about 6 dozen of my dead ancestors on it.\n\nSo - content. It has what I'm looking for. It should be laid out in a logical order for first-time visitors. People who visit every week will learn how to navigate it quickly enough. Make t easy for the first-timers.\n\nAppearance - clean, without useless decorations. A light background, dark text, text links blue and underlined, nothing else blue or underlined. Some of my fellow church web keepers disagree with me on this. My argument was that about 1 time in 20 I use my ATM card at a retail store, I push the wrong button in the wrong sequence and have to start over, because each ATM scanning port seems to have a slightly different standard. I don't want to have to play "Guess which button"; I want to pay for my loaf of bread and get home. The same on a web page; I don't want to have to guess where the text links are. I want them to be blue and underlined, just like they are on the other 90% of the sites I visit.\n\nSome genealogy sites have antique floral wallpaper and "Take Me back to West Virginia" musical background. I consider both useless decorations.\n\nBread crumbs or a navigation bar on each page help. "Bread Crumbs" show you where you are. Each word or phrase is a link. So, on a query board for Monroe County, at the top you'd see:\n\nNorth America -> USA -> West Virginia -> Monroe County\n\nClicking on the "USA" link would take you to a page of states, and so forth. (the Ancestry.com query boards do this really well.)\n\n80% - 90% of visitors to the four sites I maintain come to them through an interior page via a search engine. At least half of them have come by mistake. So, it should be clear at the top what the page has and what it is about. \n\nMy church site, for instance, is in Modesto, California. It has a map showing how to find us. We get lots of visits from people looking for a map of Modesto.\n\nThere should be a way to get to the home page on every page, at the very least. If your site had tiers, it should be easy to get "up" one tier. (For instance, if your site had mountain bikes for sale, pictures of your trip to the Alps and recipies your grandmother handed down to you, and I found the apple pie recipie, I should be able to get "up" to the recipie index with one click.)\n\nInformation - people who are buying things want prices. People looking for a church want to know where and when they meet, and, for men in California at least, if they should wear a tie. Exactly what first-time visitors want depends on the site. Whatever it is, they should be able to find it easily.\n\nOne of my pet peeves is fixed text size. Some web designers think everyone in the world has 20/20 vision and a 19-inch monitor. We don't A quality web page will allow people to enlarge or reduce the text size, and its design will not suffer. It should work at any resolution, too.\n\nI also hate it when people put a full-size picture on a site and set the dimensions to 100x200 or so; I have to wait while my browser downloads 4 MB, then wait again while it shrinks the picture.\n\nIf you have more than 100 pages, you should consider a mini-search engine. If you get one, put a link labeled "Search this site" on every page.
422336
I research alot on EllisIsland.org   you have to register, but it's a free site.     Ancestry.com costs!
662833
You can go to the ancestry web site and get info there.
74969
You can start by asking family members as much as you can about parents, grandparents etc. including places of birth etc. After you get all that information a good place to start is www.rootsweb.com, it is a free ancestry site that is hosted by www.ancestry.com. You can look up ancestors by surname (last name), locations (country,state,county,and city). There are many other headings that can help you. You can also search family trees, someone else may have already done research on one of your ancestors. You can also request a look-up and someone might research census records from 1790-1910 to help you. There is also a site www.familysearch.org., it is also a free site hosted by the LDS (Church of The Latter Day Saints), they have birth, death, marriage and the census from 1880.
297395
Is it the one you are looking for which actually gives you a lot of links to most of the states.\nhttp://www.unclaimed.org/\n \nor try\nhttp://www.missingmoney.com/\n\nHope that helps. All the best
330291
I've been researching for 3 years (i live in Maryland/ Delaware mason-dixon line area) and use ancestry.com, too. but to be honest, i found a lot of misinformation there...try rootsweb.com......it has a lot, at least it did for me and it's FREE. i paid $200 for ancestry. i found it was just a good place to start, but lots of bad "info" that can be confusing to starters, though it does have great census and newspaper collections.\nmy best advice is to enter the address for your research areas (county, state, etc.) in google and follow it from there...u will find libraries and so much more, even Archives with family records. i found out that my family were early settlers from England in the First state, Delaware, and had tons of my family's records, Bibles, etc. in the state and national archives. \nHappy Hunting! It's amazing what you'll find once you get going!
260209
Rather than copying and pasting the info, here's the link:\nhttp://www.genealogy.com/16_cousn.html\n\n\nGreat explanation and chart. :)