How to Build Your Family Tree on the Web

Researching your family tree seems as easy as conducting a Google search, but there's actually much more work and fact-checking involved, if you want to do it right.

Ancestry.com is no longer the only option when it comes to searching digital archives, connecting with others and compiling a family tree. A new crop of geneaology sites popping up on the Internet are providing some alternatives. MyHeritage and Archives.com are two useful sites that have great layouts and access to plenty of documents. On these sites you can find census records, scanned birth, marriage and death certificates, family photos and newspaper clippings, and compile these into a beautiful, digital tree.

MyHeritage uses the social web to broden your family tree using living, distant relatives plus census records.

But the first thing you need to know when researching your ancestors is that you'll need to get birth, marriage and death certificates of your suspected family members when those documents are available in order to be sure you're related to them. Genealogy websites let you build a tree using information others have already entered into the site, which can often lead to errors in your family tree if you don't fact check. You might think there weren't many people named Fanny White in rural Ohio in the 1800s but, turns out, there are a few -- a lot of seemingly uncommon names were fairly common in their day. Oftentimes you can find these documents online; other times finding them involves reaching out to county clerks' offices in the relevant town and requesting records via postal mail. Census records in the United States only go back until 1790 (and are pretty sparse the farther back you go); the 1890 census records were destroyed in a fire, so you won't find those, either. If you're researching African-American ancestors in the United States, it's unlikely you'll be able to find any records that pre-date the Civil War.

To keep things interesting along the way (research like this is a long process), you might want to try to locate pictures and newspaper clippings to add more context to your ancestor's stories.

Denie Kazan, a geneaologist at MyHeritage.com tells Mashable there are two phases in genealogy research: The first phase is when you gather all the information about the direct ancestors that you know yourself, heard about from family or found in the archives. This step is the time-consuming part. In the second phase, you go through all the details, do your best to verify them and, if relevant, add them to your tree.

MyHeritage offers a Smart Matching technology that uses the social web to grow your family tree horizontally by automatically finding matches with other family trees on the site.

"The millions of confirmed Smart Matches we have every month also enable families to take their research global, as our collection of family trees -- currently totaling 24 million and with well over one billion individuals -- is the most geographically diverse and international in the world," he said.

"Although we've built our technologies to try and mimic a human genealogist -- mistakes can still be made and it's up to the user to fully verify the information," Kazan adds.

The Record Matching technology will add some flavor to your family story by automatically finding relevant historical records relevant to your ancestors. With Record Matching, users can find birth, death, census, immigration and gravestone pictures.

Kazan used the social web to help me research my family tree. Using MyHeritage he found 1,004 people, 1,085 Smart Matches and 883 Record Matches in five collections. The MyHeritage Matches (with other user-generated info in MyHeritage family trees and records on MyHeritage) gave me a lot of new leads and also brought up some never-before-seen newspaper articles mentioning my ancestors.

If you've seen the show Who Do You Think You Are?, where each episode a different celebrity has their ancestry traced by historians and geneaologists, you know that birth and death records aren't the only way to find information. Really, if you want to trace your ancestry it's going to take some detective work and a lot of patience. But you can also have a lot of fun in the process -- it's like solving a mystery. Tap into historical societies' databases as well as county clerks offices in the town where your ancestors lived.

You might also find the website FindAGrave.com useful, but keep in mind contributors upload the content, so you'll need to fact check that information too, but it could provide some leads.

Archives.com is a site I tried out for three months with a LivingSocial coupon. The look of the family tree was beautiful, and super easy to navigate. Sometimes when you're looking at generation after generation of people, it can get confusing and you can lose track of who was related to who. My biggest issue with this site is you have to be willing to spend money for every record you access, like $5-$10. And not all of those records will be useful in your search, so that can add up to a lot of money. You might want to use the site for its good family tree layout and find the information elsewhere.

For years, genealogists have used Ancestry.com. The website was acquired by an investor group in late October for $1.6 billion, but a spokesperson for Ancestry.com tells Mashable "There are no anticipated changes in Ancestry.com?s operating structure."

Of course, no matter what site you use, finding out all this information takes a lot of work. If you're not interested in pursuing genealogy as a hobby, you might want to hire a genealogist, which you can find through these sites.

Are you researching your family tree using one of these sites or one not mentioned in this article? Tell us in the comments.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, mashabuba

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/12/19/genealogy-research-family-tree/

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