Are You New to Genealogy Research?

Welcome to the wonderful world of genealogy research!

With increased interest in doing genealogy research, I have to suggest first of all signing up to get  great information from Kimberly Powell who is the guru at about.com!  Be sure to bookmark genealogy.about.com as one of your favorite websites and sign up to get her emails sent to you regularly. She gives you some great tips on getting started, how to organize your files, different types of charts that you can use and all kinds of great websites that you can check out. 

I’ve been doing genealogy for quite a few years now, but I continue to get her emails, check out the genealogy section on about often and am amazed at the knowledge that she has. She is always listing websites that I’ve never even known about or ones that I’ve forgotten. She also has several good books that you can get at the library or purchase at the bookstore if you wish to have a hard copy on hand at all times.

When I hit “brick walls”, which I seem to do quite often with all of the different families that I’ve been researching, I will often turn to her website for inspiration and websites that might help me break that wall down.

Several other places that you can also get good genealogy search tips is from ancestry.com. They have a learning center with a wide variety of articles to assist you in learning to search for your ancestors. If you are not able to pay for the subscription part of their site, some parts of it are free, take advantage of their message boards and the other free parts of their website.

familysearch.org is another one of my favorite sites where there are thousands and thousand of records. You can also get a free family tree making file at their website if you have not purchased one elsewhere. If you would like to build your tree on-line, there are many places where you can also do that free of charge. My preference is tribalpages.com where you can control who has access to your information. They have both a free section as well as a paid subscription section which is extremely reasonable.

Other sites I like are Cyndi's List and geneabloggers,genealogy.com,olivetreegenealogy.com,and familytree.com You can get lost in them for hours and hours looking at information. Then there is findagrave.com which has many cemeteries listed both in the US and some other foreign countries where you can search for your ancestors grave site.

I found a great new website that I am going to be taking advantage of, thanks to an article today by Kimberly at about.com. You plug in your ancestors name and birth and death years and it will create a timeline for you of things that happened during their lifetime. ourtimelines.com is going to be so helpful in knowing when many things happened during their lives.

Of course you can always just use your favorite search engine, type in the name and the word family or genealogy after it and pull up many different locations where you can find information on that person (in most cases) and many people will use this as their first method of searching. Have fun searching!