Free Access To Ancestors

Internet makes finding family history easier than ever

• www.Ancestry.com
• Dutchess Genealogy Society:
www.dcgs-gen.org
• New York State Vital Statistics: www.health.state.ny.us/vital_records/genealogy.htm
• Visit www.footnote.com to use past issues of the Poughkeepsie Journal to aid your genealogical research.

Find Your Family – Find Your Ancestors

Where do you start? Well, the first and best thing to start with is to contact your relatives, especially the elderly. Through them you can find out names, occupations and other biographies. Some of them maybe have documents in form of letters, migration, marriage, old pictures and more. Then you can do a search on the names you got and get information and locate your ancestors. It is important that you always write down the information you get and from where you got them. You should have a system of how to register your ancestors.

How do you save all the information? As I earlier wrote, it is important to always take notes of the data you have obtained and from where you have got the data. First and last name, birth date, were they come from, country and more. It makes it easier to keep track of them if you need to go back to check any information if you have taken notes.

In this way, you can also create a so-called family tree. For example: You are one and your father and mother are two or three. Your grandfather and grandmother are 4 and 5 and your grandparents are 6 and 7 and so on. After a while it can be a lot of information about a person so it is very good if you have establish some system in which you have written down all information about that particular person. There are several systems for how a family tree can be designed and further information about this can be found online and there are also books to buy about this.

Save all your information on a safe place. Pictures, maps, historical information about your ancestors and more are information you don’t want to loose. And always check the sources very carefully. Original registers are the closest you can get the truth but they are not always 100 % accurate. Look after records in different archives and do check with the elderly in your family and see if they know something else about a person that you can’t find in any archives or if you think that something in the archives are wrong about a person.

The history of your family you can find in archives or books but also on the internet. There are websites where you can do a people search and trace your family tree as far back as possible. You can find birth, death, marriage, divorce and historic vital records. You can discover new connections to your family tree with cemetery listings, obituaries, burial and military records, surname histories, and more. Click on the links here below and you can do a free people search to find a relative. You can also search for your ancestors. You have to become a member to view your ancestor-search results instantly. But that is very simple and affordable.

Shadows of forgotten ancestors, a search for who we are

Access to origins, affines, ancestors, and aristocrats

Researching Scots-Irish ancestors, the essential genealogical guide to early modern Ulster, 1600-1800

De Bow's review

The Christian pioneer, ed. by J.F. Winks