Are you interested in uncovering your family history? With the right resources and tools, you can trace your ancestry and learn more about your family's past. Libraries, family history centers, historical and genealogical societies, and non-governmental archive repositories are all great places to start. The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana is particularly noteworthy for its extensive databases. The National Archives and Records Administration also holds a wealth of civil records.
Additionally, you can use websites like Find A Grave to add a memorial or search among the 210 million memorials already created. The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsor Chronicling America, a website that provides access to certain digitized newspaper pages from 1777 to 1963. This is a great resource for uncovering interesting facts about family members. If you have more recent immigrant origins or are especially interested in finding cousins abroad, consider subscribing to MyHeritage. This Israeli website is the strongest for continental Europe, Scandinavian countries and Jewish research. You can pay only for family tree creation tools or access to historical records or combine them. MyHeritage also offers powerful tools to compare family trees and find out how they may be related.
Patented genetic communities help reveal ancient migration patterns. AncestryDNA is another popular DNA analysis company that provides a detailed breakdown of ancestral origins in Great Britain and Ireland. It does not yet have a customer base as strong as the others (limiting the options for finding DNA matches) or strong tools for determining the nature of relationships with genetic matches. If you're looking for DNA matches that can still live in your ancestral land, LivingDNA may be a good option. Online tools help evaluators compare their family trees and even offer theories about how they may be related.
Google Translate, Google Books, Google Maps and Google Earth are all useful tools for genealogy research. African Ancestry is another unique site that provides education and resources to those researching African-American roots. Start with the Beginner's Guide on the Records tab and then search databases for databases on marriages, deaths, last names and slaves in the same tab. Explore the Forums and Resources tabs for information on African-American newspapers, family reunions, Caribbean research, and more. In Chat, find opportunities to socialize with and learn from other researchers. Gravestone Photographic Resource is a great resource for locating images of gravestones labeled with GPS coordinates.
You can also upload your own images with the complementary application. Subscribers can access premium features such as cemetery maps that show the location of plots, improved GPS maps and alerts for their previous searches. The main collections of historical records are for the United States, so this may be a good option for beginning researchers who believe that their families have been in the United States for several generations.