5 Popular Websites that Beginning Genealogists Love
I love that people are working hard to make genealogy easier and easier through digitizing records and making them available online. It means that most family historians can find their family faster and more conveniently. So I’m sharing my top websites that I recommend for beginning genealogists.
Family Search
This is my ultimate favorite website! It’s free, user friendly, and you can use it for more than just researching. There are family connection activities, getting to know our ancestors activities, and many other things to do on this site. You can also do a lot of research and dive deep into your family lines if that interests you.
Ancestry for Beginning Genealogists
This is another favorite because even though you have to pay a subscription fee to use this website, it’s definitely worth it with the value that it gives. You can put your family trees on this website, make it private or public as you wish, and help others with their family trees. This website has tons of records for researching your ancestor and I use it first to grab all of the easy records before moving on to others. It’s worth the money in my book and a must for beginner genealogists.
FindaGrave
This one is specifically for any and all burial information. It’s free and easy to use. This site is primarily for burials and death information, but it contains whatever else people want to put on it. So I’ve found full obituaries on this site, links to other family members, birth information, newspaper articles, etc. So as a beginner, you can get a lot of information from one place. Now a word of caution, because people are putting the information in themselves, there might be errors just because we’re human. Make sure you are using other records to back up or to correct this information. Otherwise, it’s a great place to start.
NewspaperArchive
This one has a subscription to it, but if you can afford it, then it’s worth the value. You can pay just for the month that you need it or you can do yearly subscriptions. It’s flexible that way. But this website is fantastic for all things newspaper. If you want to look for your ancestor in the newspapers, then this website is what I would recommend.
Fold3 for Beginning Genealogists
Last but not least is Fold3 for military records. Now Ancestry and FamilySearch have many military records at easy reach, but if you can’t find them there, then I recommend this one. It’s also a subscription site so budget for that, but it’s user friendly and I’ve found more military records with this site than any other separate from Ancestry and FamilySearch. I’ve also found full pension files on here that give other genealogy information such as family connections and stories about their lives.
Conclusion
These websites are what I recommend to all beginning genealogists. If you can’t afford some of these subscriptions, then start with one or start with paying as you need them then canceling the subscription. But in today’s genealogy research world, you need websites to do your genealogy. So start with these and then expand as you need to.
And as always I’m here for you when you get stuck.
Good luck and happy hunting!
Tiffany
P.S. Related Reads…
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