Genealogy Websites

If you are like me, you find that you tend to use the same websites for your genealogy research. I received an email from one of our Society members who too, shares my downfall when researching. She stated that she welcomes ideas about different sites or resources that she may not have tired.

She recommends Legacy Family Tree which offers free weekly webinars online on a wide variety of genealogy related subjects presented by many different experts in the field, mostly on Wednesdays but occasionally on Fridays as well. The webcasts last for about an hour to one and a half hours long. Check out the schedule at http://familytreewebinars.com/ for upcoming sessions. I personally have attended these and learn a lot from them. Since I normally volunteer on Wednesdays at my local genealogical library I miss the live presentations, but they offer one week of free viewing afterwards. However, you can purchase a membership and view hundreds of hours of past webinars and print out handouts too.

Another site this member suggested was Familyrootspublishing.com that has an extensive offering of books and guides about all phases of genealogy, research and history. They offer a free Genealogy newsline email newsletter. I too found this website and subscribe to the newsletter and enjoy reading it weekly.

She finally asked, aside from some of the standbys like Ancestry, Find a Grave Fold 3 and other well-used sites, what are some resources that have helped you?

Before I answer her question, I would like to say that after volunteering in the Library and teaching some beginning classes, the only website that most people know about is Ancestry.com. Many don’t know about Find A Grave, Fold 3, FamilySearch.org and others. 

I personally seem to use Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and Find-A-Grave. I have a subscription to Ancestry and FamilySearch.org is mostly free until it directs you to other sites for the images. One of the sites it directs you to is Ancestry and thus I am cover but the other is Fold 3 which I don’t have. However, our Society offers Ancestry, Fold 3 and Newspapers.com on their three computers from October through May. All I have to do is bring a flash drive and save whatever I find.  

After receiving this email, I decided to look at and revamp the links on our society webpage at http://lhgs.weebly.com/web-links.html . I made sure all the links still work, I group our local links on top and some tools way at the bottom.

I find a lot of new links to try from my subscription to Family Tree Magazine plus on their website at http://familytreemagazine.com/article/101-best-websites-2014. Just change the year in the link to 2013 or 2012 and you will find past years links back to 2010. A lot are duplicates, and older list might have broken links to websites that don’t exist or if they changed their address, but are still fun to look at.

So what are some resources that have helped you?