Free genealogy research - Find your family tree

Researching your Family Tree needn't be expensive. In fact many of the best sources of information are completely FREE!!!!

The first and most important free genealogy resource to access is your own relatives.They will have memories, photos, documents and stories to tell. Photos can have vital information noted on the back. Useful sources to look out for include birth, marriage, and death certificates, family bibles, newspaper cuttings, identity cards, scrapbooks, old letters obituaries wedding and engagement announcements. Take a careful note of any anecdotes and memories that they have, this will bring your research to life, and may even reveal a long kept family secret! Genealogy is not just about researching names and dates in old archives!

The Church of Jesus Christ Latterday Saints (LDS / Mormon) website "Family Search" has a huge free genealogy database of births, deaths and marriages, and also free census lookups for certain years and countries. These records must however be treated with caution. Many have been submitted to the database with no verification, others are transcriptions from original parish records,some of which may contain errors. However, they are an excellent starting place with their easy to search records. You are sure to find some of your ancestors there. Once you have found them its time to check your findings against the original Parish Records, this is very important. One of the first rules of genealogy is to always check the original source - don't rely on a transcript or someone elses research.

Parish Records, including Baptisms, Marriages and Burials can be accessed for FREE at County Record Offices who will also hold microfiche images of local census records for 1841 - 1901. They also hold archives of old local newspapers and many historical documents relating to families in the county. These free genealogy records are invaluable. The Record Offices will also hold other documents which you may have to pay to access, but which are free to search. You can find a lot of information on the summary report for these documents. The summary usually contains most of the information thatyou need, and someone else has already managed to transcribe these difficult to read documents.

Another good free genealogy resource for family tree information are graveyards. If you know where your ancestor or relative lived and died a visit to the churchyard in their town or village can reveal much. Monumental Inscriptions on headstones often contain a wealth of information, including details of spouses, parents and children. Often members of the same family were buried close together and you may discover relatives whom you previously knew nothing about

A new FREE genealogy resource which is growing in popularity are Online Parish Clerks. These, where available, often contain many transcriptions of Parish Records, Monumental Inscriptions, details of Hearth taxes and other records not found elsewhere online. These websites are maintained by enthuastic Family History researchers who are often happy to do a free look up for you. To find an online parish clerk in the area you are investigating do a search in Google, or other search engine for "online parish clerk" plus the name of the village, town, or County you are interested in.

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