Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com, page 2
. You won’t need all of them right now—and there may be some you never use—but at the least, grab the Five-Generation Ancestor Chart and the Family Group Sheet. (You’ll find them under Basic Charts and Worksheets. Fill out the family group sheet for you and your family (i.e., spouse, children, and grandchildren). You also can do this in your computer software if you’ve digitized your research.
TAKE YOUR TREES ON THE GO
Carry your family tree on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device. The Ancestry.com app on your device syncs with your Ancestry.com account online, making it easy to keep all of your research records up-to-date. Displays are customizable, allowing you to view your tree, photos, stories, and research hints.
Put on Your Barbara Walters Hat
Thanks to the Internet, many of your cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are online. That makes doing interviews or gathering family stories so much easier than traveling to where they lived or waiting weeks for back-and-forth snail mail. If you decide to interview via e-mail, make sure the person you’re interviewing wants to respond in the same way; some people don’t like to type that much. If they’d rather do a phone interview, send the questions in advance so they’ll have time to think about it, then record the phone interview.
If you have a smartphone or tablet, you don’t even need a digital recorder to record a phone interview; you can use your device’s built-in recorder or pick up one of the many recording apps on the market (most are under two dollars). One of the apps, Dragon Dictation, will even transcribe your notes, up to one minute at a time. There are also recorder apps that will record your smartphone call (just be sure you let the person on the other end of the call know you’re recording).
Can’t decide which family members to interview? A rule of thumb is to begin with the oldest. Countless genealogy folks lament the fact they never interviewed an elderly relative before it was “too late.” Your oldest relatives are the keepers of the family’s furthest back memories. Amazingly, one of my aunts could remember her great-grandmother—a woman who was a Civil War bride!
Your oldest relative also may remember stories and weird little tidbits that you’ll never find in a book or a database, such as “Grandma always wore black,” or “Your dad’s favorite meal was pork loin.” Use the clues in these interviews to dig back further in your history and add personality to your family book or a scrapbook.
Something to keep in mind, though: Whatever stories you hear during the interviews are just stories until proven. In my experience, most family lore is actually based in fact, though the accuracy of the facts, like the telephone game, may degrade over time.
Depending on your interviewee’s memory, it’s possible you’ll discover a fabulous clue that opens whole new research vistas. Or, you may hear a tiny bit of a story that leads you to another clue and then another. I can guarantee one thing: You’ll always learn more than you expected, particularly from elderly relatives.
If you’re doing the interview in person, be sure to ask if your relative has documents or photographs of the family. Most people are reluctant to let these treasures out of their hands, so be sure to bring along a portable scanner or digital camera. Again, many smartphone and tablet apps can turn your device into a scanner. Depending on the app, scans are saved in JPG (image) or PDF (document) format.
The most important thing I’ve learned about interviews is that a story that has absolutely no relevance to you today may be a breakthrough clue five years from now. So be sure to transcribe those interviews so you can go back to your notes in the future.
So what are you waiting for? Make a list of relatives you want to interview and the questions you want to ask them. Set up at least one interview. If applicable, download a recording app for your smartphone or tablet.
Look for More Than Just Names and Dates
As you do interviews (don’t forget to interview yourself!), remember that family history is about far more than just names and dates. Just like you, your ancestors were flesh and blood “real people.” They argued, had political and religious differences, brought rituals and celebrations from their country of origin, went to school, hated homework, battled illness, and witnessed great change.
The more you can uncover about the time and place of your ancestors’ lives, or the more stories you can gather about them, the more likely you are to see aspects of their lives reflected in your own.
A caveat, though: Just because something is online doesn’t mean it’s true, and you should always check information for sources. There’s a tremendous amount of erroneous genealogy information floating around the Web, and (like cute cat videos) they just keep getting passed around from person to person. Use what you find online as a jumping-off place for further investigation—not as the destination.
Get Organized
Whether you keep paper records or digital ones, find a filing system that works for you. If you continue your genealogy research over several years, trust me … you don’t want five years to get past you and all you have to show for it are boxes of paper.
It’s really common in this hobby to jump in, print records, toss them in a pile, and then years later bemoan the fact that you can’t find anything. With computers, this is less likely, as you can always do a system-wide search for something you saved. However, the success of the search depends on how well you named a record when you first downloaded and saved it.
Which brings me to a point about file naming: Whatever system you use to name a digital file, be consistent. Begin the file name with either the Surname or Placename, or whatever makes sense to you. Give the file name enough information (e.g., birth, death, marriage, Ohio) that it will be rounded up in a system-wide search.
Before you begin collecting and organizing documents and photos into folders or files, consider whether you have documents that need special handling, such as the following:
Photographs: If you store photos in boxes, use ones made of acid-free materials and acid-free dividers. If you write on the back of photos (which is not recommended), use a photo-safe pen. Photos should be stored at room temperature, preferably between 65 to 70 degrees, with a relative humidity of about 50 percent.
Documents: Again, store these in an acid-free environment, protected from light, heat, and high humidity. The best storage containers are acid-free boxes or archival plastic sleeves. Because of dampness issues, avoid storing documents in the attic or the basement. Try to avoid using PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plastic page-protector sheets, because they release damaging acids over time. If you store documents together, slip a piece of acid-free paper between each one. As much as you might think it’s a good idea, don’t laminate your documents. If fragile, they can be damaged by the high heat used in the lamination process.
Newspapers: Newspapers are made of highly acidic paper, causing them to deteriorate quickly. Like other documents, store newspapers in an acid-free box or archival scrapbook, interspersed with acid-free paper.
Books: Keep books out of direct sunlight as sun will bleach dust jackets and dry out leather covers. Books do best when stored upright on a shelf rather than stacked one on top of another. If stored on wooden shelves, seal the wood as unsealed wood can release acidic vapors. If a book is especially valuable, store it in an archival box.
SET A PLAN
See the Family Tree Magazine article at for good ideas on how to develop an organizational system. Organize Your Genealogy (Family Tree Books, 2016) also has some great tips and strategies.
Six Genealogy Myths
You can buy your family crest. Cups, mugs, wall hangings, and other family crest doodads are available online everywhere. But “families” don’t have crests—rather, individuals do. Coats of arms must be granted, and to claim the right to arms, you must prove descent through a male line of someone to whom arms were granted. Learn the truth about family crests at.
The 1890 census burned to a crisp. Actually, it didn’t—it was waterlogged and lay around rotting until some unknown person authorized its disposal. But fractions survived, as well as about half of a Civil War Union veterans census. These records are available on sites such as Ancestry.com.
You can find your whole family history online. If only! Nowadays you can get lots of actual records online, including censuses, passenger lists, military records, digitized books—and on and on. But errors abound in online indexes, transcriptions, and family trees, and repositories still hold richly detailed, lesser-known records that haven’t been digitized. So at some point, you’ll want or need to log off and go to the library.
Your ancestor was a Cherokee princess or George Washington. Lots of families have legends about famous kin, and of course they could be true—but stories tend to get embellished and even made up over time, so research such legends before passing them on as the truth. For example, though you may have Cherokee blood, there weren’t any Cherokee princesses, and George Washington can’t be an ancestor because he never had children (Martha did, from her first marriage). Also, not everyone with the same last name is related, even when you go waaaaaaay back in time.
The courthouse burned, and all the records are gone. Many a genealogical dream has run smack into a courthouse fire. But the vital records, naturalizations, deeds, wills, and other records within weren’t always completely destroyed. Sometimes records survived, or copies had been sent to another office, or the clerk asked citizens for copies of their records, or you can find the same information elsewhere. See Family Tree Magazine’s tips for beating brick walls at and contact the county library or state archives, whose staffs may have prepared special helps for genealogists researching around courthouse blazes.
Your ancestor’s name was changed at Ellis Island. This may be the biggest genealogical myth of all time. Passenger lists were created at the port of departure, and Ellis Island officials merely checked off the names on the list. (One reason why knowing your ancestor’s name in the old country will help you find his passenger record.)
WELCOME TO ANCESTRY.COM
Now that we’ve covered Genealogy 101, let’s explore Ancestry.com. Although Ancestry.com is massive, it’s easy to navigate once you familiarize yourself with the layout. I’ll be giving several examples of real-life navigation, so go ahead, log in, and follow along.
Set Up Your Account
First, set up your account or log in at the Ancestry.com home page (image A). Enter your username and password, then click the Sign In button. If you already are a subscriber and have forgotten your password, click the Forgot? link for help. If you’re new to Ancestry.com, click the green Subscribe button or Start Free Trial to see the available subscription plans. (Note: At print time, the All Access subscription is not offered as part of the free fourteen-day trial. However, if you click the green Subscribe button at the top right of the page, you’ll see all of the subscription options.)
As noted, some sections of the site, such as AncestrySupport and family trees, are available to nonsubscribers. However, you won’t be able to access the premium databases without a subscription. See chapter 2 to learn how to create your family tree online, whether or not you have a subscription.
The Ancestry.com home page is where you’ll start your journey.
Explore the Menu Items
Once you log in, explore all of the menu items. You’ll see a menu bar stretching across the top of the page. On the far right side, you’ll see an e-mail icon alerting you to messages, a green leaf with recent hints that are waiting for you to evaluate, and your username.
Here’s what each of these icons do:
Leaf icon: Click the leaf icon to display a list of record-based hints for people in your family tree. You’ll have to create a family tree first to get any hints, but we’ll cover that in chapter 2.
E-mail icon: Go to the e-mail icon to read messages sent to you through the Ancestry.com system from other users.
Your name: Click your name to access account information, including your member profile, preferences, and e-mail settings. If you change your e-mail address while you have an Ancestry.com subscription, don’t forget to go into your profile and update the e-mail address there as well.
On the right side of the My Account Options page (under the Your Account tab), you’ll find several options including updating your e-mail preferences. Click this link to subscribe to Ancestry.com’s newsletters—a great way to stay informed of the latest news and collections. From My Account Options, you also can upgrade to another subscription plan.
Site Preferences, also available from the dropdown menu under your username, allows you to choose hint, community, and activity preferences. For example, you can choose whether to let other Ancestry.com members access your e-mail address or whether you want to remain anonymous. In the right-side column, you’ll also find a link to connect your Ancestry.com account with your Facebook profile.
Explore the Main Menu Bar
The menu bar itself (image B) has several items located in dropdown menus that are accessed by clicking the appropriate tab. For example, if you click Search, other menu choices appear in a dropdown menu.
Don’t worry about where to go first, as each section of the menu is covered in this book:
Home: chapter 1
Trees: chapter 2
Search: chapters 3–11
DNA: chapters 12–14
Help: chapters 1
Extras: chapters 1
Navigate the major record collections on Ancestry.com using the Search tab, part of Ancestry.com’s main menu toolbar.
View and Customize Your Home Page
The area below the menu is your home page (image C), which you can customize with a variety of modules. By default (and this may change over time), the home page contains:
Recent Member Connect Activity: When you log in to your account, your default view may contain this module. If not, you can add it to your home page. Click See More to view the items you can add to this module such as activity on your tree(s), activity on records you’ve recently worked with, photos saved by your connections, and other members who are saving the content you’ve added.
Your Trees(s): This module contains information on any tree that you’ve created or uploaded, along with the number of people in the tree, photos, and the last person on the tree that you viewed.
Search: This is a quick search box with a link to the advanced search options.
What’s Happening at Ancestry.com: This provides a list of links to new records recently added to Ancestry.com’s collections. Ancestry.com is constantly adding new data, so be sure to check this section often. Just because a specific record isn’t online today doesn’t mean it won’t be there next month. I was searching for a person who lived in South Dakota in the mid-nineteenth century, and had little luck. However, a year later, I was able to track him down in a newly added index to South Dakota cemeteries (1831–2008). By the way, this particular collection (along with several others) has a link that takes you off Ancestry.com and to another site (in this case the South Dakota State Historical Society) where you can view more of the record.
In addition to the default modules, you also can add the following modules by clicking the Customize Your Homepage link at the top of the home page. From here, you can add or delete any of the default or additional modules, or move them via drag-and-drop. Here are some of the modules you can add:
Get Started on Ancestry: Quick tips for using the site
My Quick Links: A list of pages you view most often
My To-Do List: A personalized list of tasks
Record Collections: Quick navigation to key collections such as the US census
Jewish Name Variations: Derivations for common Jewish first names
Jewish Community Locator: Track communities through time
Message Board Favorites: Your favorite Message Boards and the most recent threads posted to each
Why not stop now and set up your home page? As you become more familiar with Ancestry.com and use more features, you can always return here and reconfigure.
Your customizable home page will give you access to various news items, tools, and shortcuts.
AncestrySupport
If you’re new to genealogy and/or the site, visit AncestrySupport to enter the world’s largest genealogy customer care center. From the AncestrySupport tab (image D), you can delve into support topics on DNA, search and records, accounts and billing, and member trees. You can also browse through the most common topics or use the search box at the top of the page to find a topic of interest.
From the AncestrySupport top menu, you can also navigate to Mobile. This is where you’ll find topics on getting the most value from the Ancestry.com mobile app (available for iOS and Android devices).
Getting Started contains exactly what you might think: articles for people who are new, not only to Ancestry.com, but also to genealogy itself. Use the Search box to find free genealogy forms as well as tips on various types of research, such as British or Australian.
TAKE YOUR TREES ON THE GO
Carry your family tree on your iPad, iPhone, or Android device. The Ancestry.com app on your device syncs with your Ancestry.com account online, making it easy to keep all of your research records up-to-date. Displays are customizable, allowing you to view your tree, photos, stories, and research hints.
Put on Your Barbara Walters Hat
Thanks to the Internet, many of your cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are online. That makes doing interviews or gathering family stories so much easier than traveling to where they lived or waiting weeks for back-and-forth snail mail. If you decide to interview via e-mail, make sure the person you’re interviewing wants to respond in the same way; some people don’t like to type that much. If they’d rather do a phone interview, send the questions in advance so they’ll have time to think about it, then record the phone interview.
If you have a smartphone or tablet, you don’t even need a digital recorder to record a phone interview; you can use your device’s built-in recorder or pick up one of the many recording apps on the market (most are under two dollars). One of the apps, Dragon Dictation
Can’t decide which family members to interview? A rule of thumb is to begin with the oldest. Countless genealogy folks lament the fact they never interviewed an elderly relative before it was “too late.” Your oldest relatives are the keepers of the family’s furthest back memories. Amazingly, one of my aunts could remember her great-grandmother—a woman who was a Civil War bride!
Your oldest relative also may remember stories and weird little tidbits that you’ll never find in a book or a database, such as “Grandma always wore black,” or “Your dad’s favorite meal was pork loin.” Use the clues in these interviews to dig back further in your history and add personality to your family book or a scrapbook.
Something to keep in mind, though: Whatever stories you hear during the interviews are just stories until proven. In my experience, most family lore is actually based in fact, though the accuracy of the facts, like the telephone game, may degrade over time.
Depending on your interviewee’s memory, it’s possible you’ll discover a fabulous clue that opens whole new research vistas. Or, you may hear a tiny bit of a story that leads you to another clue and then another. I can guarantee one thing: You’ll always learn more than you expected, particularly from elderly relatives.
If you’re doing the interview in person, be sure to ask if your relative has documents or photographs of the family. Most people are reluctant to let these treasures out of their hands, so be sure to bring along a portable scanner or digital camera. Again, many smartphone and tablet apps can turn your device into a scanner. Depending on the app, scans are saved in JPG (image) or PDF (document) format.
The most important thing I’ve learned about interviews is that a story that has absolutely no relevance to you today may be a breakthrough clue five years from now. So be sure to transcribe those interviews so you can go back to your notes in the future.
So what are you waiting for? Make a list of relatives you want to interview and the questions you want to ask them. Set up at least one interview. If applicable, download a recording app for your smartphone or tablet.
Look for More Than Just Names and Dates
As you do interviews (don’t forget to interview yourself!), remember that family history is about far more than just names and dates. Just like you, your ancestors were flesh and blood “real people.” They argued, had political and religious differences, brought rituals and celebrations from their country of origin, went to school, hated homework, battled illness, and witnessed great change.
The more you can uncover about the time and place of your ancestors’ lives, or the more stories you can gather about them, the more likely you are to see aspects of their lives reflected in your own.
A caveat, though: Just because something is online doesn’t mean it’s true, and you should always check information for sources. There’s a tremendous amount of erroneous genealogy information floating around the Web, and (like cute cat videos) they just keep getting passed around from person to person. Use what you find online as a jumping-off place for further investigation—not as the destination.
Get Organized
Whether you keep paper records or digital ones, find a filing system that works for you. If you continue your genealogy research over several years, trust me … you don’t want five years to get past you and all you have to show for it are boxes of paper.
It’s really common in this hobby to jump in, print records, toss them in a pile, and then years later bemoan the fact that you can’t find anything. With computers, this is less likely, as you can always do a system-wide search for something you saved. However, the success of the search depends on how well you named a record when you first downloaded and saved it.
Which brings me to a point about file naming: Whatever system you use to name a digital file, be consistent. Begin the file name with either the Surname or Placename, or whatever makes sense to you. Give the file name enough information (e.g., birth, death, marriage, Ohio) that it will be rounded up in a system-wide search.
Before you begin collecting and organizing documents and photos into folders or files, consider whether you have documents that need special handling, such as the following:
Photographs: If you store photos in boxes, use ones made of acid-free materials and acid-free dividers. If you write on the back of photos (which is not recommended), use a photo-safe pen. Photos should be stored at room temperature, preferably between 65 to 70 degrees, with a relative humidity of about 50 percent.
Documents: Again, store these in an acid-free environment, protected from light, heat, and high humidity. The best storage containers are acid-free boxes or archival plastic sleeves. Because of dampness issues, avoid storing documents in the attic or the basement. Try to avoid using PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plastic page-protector sheets, because they release damaging acids over time. If you store documents together, slip a piece of acid-free paper between each one. As much as you might think it’s a good idea, don’t laminate your documents. If fragile, they can be damaged by the high heat used in the lamination process.
Newspapers: Newspapers are made of highly acidic paper, causing them to deteriorate quickly. Like other documents, store newspapers in an acid-free box or archival scrapbook, interspersed with acid-free paper.
Books: Keep books out of direct sunlight as sun will bleach dust jackets and dry out leather covers. Books do best when stored upright on a shelf rather than stacked one on top of another. If stored on wooden shelves, seal the wood as unsealed wood can release acidic vapors. If a book is especially valuable, store it in an archival box.
SET A PLAN
See the Family Tree Magazine article at
Six Genealogy Myths
You can buy your family crest. Cups, mugs, wall hangings, and other family crest doodads are available online everywhere. But “families” don’t have crests—rather, individuals do. Coats of arms must be granted, and to claim the right to arms, you must prove descent through a male line of someone to whom arms were granted. Learn the truth about family crests at
The 1890 census burned to a crisp. Actually, it didn’t—it was waterlogged and lay around rotting until some unknown person authorized its disposal. But fractions survived, as well as about half of a Civil War Union veterans census. These records are available on sites such as Ancestry.com.
You can find your whole family history online. If only! Nowadays you can get lots of actual records online, including censuses, passenger lists, military records, digitized books—and on and on. But errors abound in online indexes, transcriptions, and family trees, and repositories still hold richly detailed, lesser-known records that haven’t been digitized. So at some point, you’ll want or need to log off and go to the library.
Your ancestor was a Cherokee princess or George Washington. Lots of families have legends about famous kin, and of course they could be true—but stories tend to get embellished and even made up over time, so research such legends before passing them on as the truth. For example, though you may have Cherokee blood, there weren’t any Cherokee princesses, and George Washington can’t be an ancestor because he never had children (Martha did, from her first marriage). Also, not everyone with the same last name is related, even when you go waaaaaaay back in time.
The courthouse burned, and all the records are gone. Many a genealogical dream has run smack into a courthouse fire. But the vital records, naturalizations, deeds, wills, and other records within weren’t always completely destroyed. Sometimes records survived, or copies had been sent to another office, or the clerk asked citizens for copies of their records, or you can find the same information elsewhere. See Family Tree Magazine’s tips for beating brick walls at
Your ancestor’s name was changed at Ellis Island. This may be the biggest genealogical myth of all time. Passenger lists were created at the port of departure, and Ellis Island officials merely checked off the names on the list. (One reason why knowing your ancestor’s name in the old country will help you find his passenger record.)
WELCOME TO ANCESTRY.COM
Now that we’ve covered Genealogy 101, let’s explore Ancestry.com. Although Ancestry.com is massive, it’s easy to navigate once you familiarize yourself with the layout. I’ll be giving several examples of real-life navigation, so go ahead, log in, and follow along.
Set Up Your Account
First, set up your account or log in at the Ancestry.com home page
As noted, some sections of the site, such as AncestrySupport
The Ancestry.com home page is where you’ll start your journey.
Explore the Menu Items
Once you log in, explore all of the menu items. You’ll see a menu bar stretching across the top of the page. On the far right side, you’ll see an e-mail icon alerting you to messages, a green leaf with recent hints that are waiting for you to evaluate, and your username.
Here’s what each of these icons do:
Leaf icon: Click the leaf icon to display a list of record-based hints for people in your family tree. You’ll have to create a family tree first to get any hints, but we’ll cover that in chapter 2.
E-mail icon: Go to the e-mail icon to read messages sent to you through the Ancestry.com system from other users.
Your name: Click your name to access account information, including your member profile, preferences, and e-mail settings. If you change your e-mail address while you have an Ancestry.com subscription, don’t forget to go into your profile and update the e-mail address there as well.
On the right side of the My Account Options page (under the Your Account tab), you’ll find several options including updating your e-mail preferences. Click this link to subscribe to Ancestry.com’s newsletters—a great way to stay informed of the latest news and collections. From My Account Options, you also can upgrade to another subscription plan.
Site Preferences, also available from the dropdown menu under your username, allows you to choose hint, community, and activity preferences. For example, you can choose whether to let other Ancestry.com members access your e-mail address or whether you want to remain anonymous. In the right-side column, you’ll also find a link to connect your Ancestry.com account with your Facebook profile.
Explore the Main Menu Bar
The menu bar itself (image B) has several items located in dropdown menus that are accessed by clicking the appropriate tab. For example, if you click Search, other menu choices appear in a dropdown menu.
Don’t worry about where to go first, as each section of the menu is covered in this book:
Home: chapter 1
Trees: chapter 2
Search: chapters 3–11
DNA: chapters 12–14
Help: chapters 1
Extras: chapters 1
Navigate the major record collections on Ancestry.com using the Search tab, part of Ancestry.com’s main menu toolbar.
View and Customize Your Home Page
The area below the menu is your home page (image C), which you can customize with a variety of modules. By default (and this may change over time), the home page contains:
Recent Member Connect Activity: When you log in to your account, your default view may contain this module. If not, you can add it to your home page. Click See More to view the items you can add to this module such as activity on your tree(s), activity on records you’ve recently worked with, photos saved by your connections, and other members who are saving the content you’ve added.
Your Trees(s): This module contains information on any tree that you’ve created or uploaded, along with the number of people in the tree, photos, and the last person on the tree that you viewed.
Search: This is a quick search box with a link to the advanced search options.
What’s Happening at Ancestry.com: This provides a list of links to new records recently added to Ancestry.com’s collections. Ancestry.com is constantly adding new data, so be sure to check this section often. Just because a specific record isn’t online today doesn’t mean it won’t be there next month. I was searching for a person who lived in South Dakota in the mid-nineteenth century, and had little luck. However, a year later, I was able to track him down in a newly added index to South Dakota cemeteries (1831–2008). By the way, this particular collection (along with several others) has a link that takes you off Ancestry.com and to another site (in this case the South Dakota State Historical Society) where you can view more of the record.
In addition to the default modules, you also can add the following modules by clicking the Customize Your Homepage link at the top of the home page. From here, you can add or delete any of the default or additional modules, or move them via drag-and-drop. Here are some of the modules you can add:
Get Started on Ancestry: Quick tips for using the site
My Quick Links: A list of pages you view most often
My To-Do List: A personalized list of tasks
Record Collections: Quick navigation to key collections such as the US census
Jewish Name Variations: Derivations for common Jewish first names
Jewish Community Locator: Track communities through time
Message Board Favorites: Your favorite Message Boards and the most recent threads posted to each
Why not stop now and set up your home page? As you become more familiar with Ancestry.com and use more features, you can always return here and reconfigure.
Your customizable home page will give you access to various news items, tools, and shortcuts.
AncestrySupport
If you’re new to genealogy and/or the site, visit AncestrySupport
From the AncestrySupport top menu, you can also navigate to Mobile. This is where you’ll find topics on getting the most value from the Ancestry.com mobile app (available for iOS and Android devices).
Getting Started contains exactly what you might think: articles for people who are new, not only to Ancestry.com, but also to genealogy itself. Use the Search box to find free genealogy forms as well as tips on various types of research, such as British or Australian.
