Saturday, September 1, 2012

Free Research Into Your Family History

Want a free peek into a powerful genealogical tool?  For this weekend--until midnight September 3rd--you can have a free pass through Ancestry.com's census records.  You can search their census records, including those on individuals from 1790 through 1940, and see the photo of the actual census record, including misspelled names and other details.  Of  course, you have to register (with an email address), so that you can be peppered with ads for  quite awhile.  But it gives you a chance to see if you would like to subscribe.  Or you can give it a test run, and call your local library to see if they subscribe.  If they do, it won't be remote access (that you can get at home), but if you are a dedicated genealogist on a budget, it might be worth running down to the library.

While Ancestry.com has wonderful things that can put genealogy in your lap(top), there's another tool that is genuinely free all the time that you might be interested in.  It's Family Search, gathered together by the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons).  You can search the census records,and you can get valuable information: members of the household at the time of the census, for instance, and their relationships, marital status, etc.  You can only see copies of the original for the 1940 census online, but you will get enough bibliographic information on other census years to hunt down copies of the original at a local library.  In fact, you can get a directory of Family Search Centers around the country where you can get help with your genealogical search. 

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