How can I find my whole background ancesters online for free and where?

[GuessWho(:<]

OMG!! This report i have to do at school is 1400 points but the majority of that is from my history.I can't find anything online that is free. The Website pretends to know where I come from and then say that i have to pay like ten dollars a month in order to get it. Its driving me insane. Please help me!!!

ancestry.com is not free, ither is my heritage.com or genesomethin.com

[Polly]

Did you try Ancestry.com?

[lemonade16]

If the report is that important to you, you might want to consider spending a little money on it. However, http://www.ancestry.com does have a free trial, in which you can access much of their archives for 14 days without paying. I have actually gotten quite far into my family history on Ancestry using just the free trial. Their site is easy to use, and genealogies become addictive once you start them!

[redunicorn]

Start with your parents and grandparents. That will be enough for school. If there is a Mormon Family Center near you or a good public library, you can see if your family was somewhere in the last census that became public.

Don't expect to find a full background on you online for free.

I have been working on my family history for over 30 years.Ancestory.com was of little help. Finally something that an aunt said led me to find a great aunt's phone number that I had never met and she was willing to give me the facts I needed.

[wndrlys]

I recently had to prove that I'm Jewish, which required that I research my ancestors going back at least five generations. It took forever, and I was also determined to do it for free. It was almost impossible.

The first thing you need to do is interview family members and start building a family tree... begin with living relatives. I found all sorts of family I didn't know I had, and they didn't know about me either, but now we're all facebook friends.

Ask them questions about where your family comes from. With that information in hand, you will be better equipped to start searching online databases.

In some cases, you may reach dead ends before coming into any conclusive info, but don't give up.

If you are in the U.S. and your family emigrated here, then you can research the Ellis Island records for free, which might help.

Another great resource for me turned out to be the cemetery where many of my relatives are interred, because they maintain records of interment, which include information on origin, birth, survivors, etc.

Something else that was useful for me was just running web searches for my last name and looking for connections to the cities where I knew I had family. Some people had already dedicated websites to my geneology, and they had reached stopping points where my information began.

Another resource that I used was the Yad Vashem database. It's a free search for records pertaining to holocaust victims. It's tragic, but I found some of the records that proved most useful there.

Good luck finding out about your family.

[kat]

they gave a lot of good answers...also try http://www.familysearch.org it is the Later-Dayy Saints site and you can find a ton of information on there as well. Try genealogy.com, rootsweb.com,rootsweb world connect, there are tons of sites online. If you type in your surname with "genealogy" after it sometimes you can find information that way as well. Best way is, as another poster suggested, to start with yourself and work your way back, your parents, their parents, their grandparents, you'll get much further than you realize before you know it. Best of luck.

[Shirley T]

I don't know what you mean by whole background ancestors. Genealogy is not a matter of putting a name in a websites and there it all is.

Your public library might have a subscription to Ancestry.Com you can use. What I like about Ancestry.Com is it original source records. They have all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.
The have military,land, immigration and other records. They have indexes to vital records(birth,marriage and death) of many U.S. states.

Not all records are online but the ones they have will save you time and money.

Now, family trees in their website or any websites whether free or not free, must be viewed with caution. However, since this is a school project and you have limited time it probably wouldn't hurt for you to go ahead and copy anything that you find in a family tree on some of your family. The trees are usually not documented or poorly documented. You frequently will see different info on the same people from different subscribers. Then you will see the same info on the same people from different subscribers but that is no proof the information is valid as there are a lot of people copying without verifying. I found out recently me, my sister and brother-in-law are all dead. We died in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey.
They had lots of my family on both sides of the family marrying and dying in New Jersey and my ancestry is mostly southern American colonial. It was in a tree on Ancestry.Com but if the tree had been submitted to any of the other websites it would have been on theirs also. You can make up a fictitious family tree and it will be accepted by any of the genealogy websites.
You need to understand that in case at a later time, you want to really find and come up with a good verifable family tree.

A good free source is a Family History Center at a Latter Day Saints(Mormon) Church. They have records on people all over the world, not just Mormons. In Salt Lake City, they have the world's largest genealogical collection. Their FHCs can order microfilm for you to view at a nominal fee.

I have never had them to try and convert me or send their missionaries by to ring my doorbell. I haven't heard of them doing that to anyone else that has used their resources.