Free Genealogy Resource: Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America is a constantly growing website that is loaded with free genealogy resources. It is also FREE! 

It links lots of libraries, archives and museums from all over the U.S. They contribute digitized items such as photographs, posters, and newspapers. It has links to the actual images of the items. It isn't just another index. This is the real deal! A great resource.

Be sure you check DPLA out! 

Genealogy Search tips for finding your Ancestors on Google

There are tons of resources out there these days to search your family tree. Here are a few search tips that will help you find what you are actually trying to find on google.

Quotation Marks

Make sure when you are searching google for your family member that you use "quotation marks".  This will help get you what you want. Without quotation marks google will return items that have either of your search terms and they don't have to be related to one another. With quotes you will get items that are more closely related and it will contain both of your search terms.

Site specific searches..

If you are looking to get search results from a certain website only you can limit your search just type the following:

Site:ancestory.com "john doe"  

This will return items on john doe from ancestory.com only.

Use a date range

Be sure to use dates in your searches when you can. Even if you don't know the actual dates just a date range you can narrow down your google search by adding dates.  This will help tremendously when you are hunting for birth, death, and marriages but are not sure of the exact dates. You do this by adding the DATE..DATE to the search.

You can simply add the following to your search: 1920..1925

So if I am hunting for John Doe who died between 1920 to 1925 then you can narrow down your results by searching the following:

"John Doe" 1920..1925 

The results will include at least one of the dates above. Please note this doesn't exclude other dates however there is a way to do that too!

Exclude results

If you are getting results that you would like to exclude because they are not what you need. For example: If your John Doe results keep giving you John Doe from SC and you know that your John Doe was from NC you can exclude that from your search. Simply use a minus sign to do so. You can exclude websites this way too. So you would type the following to search for John Doe without SC.

"John Doe" -SC

Search Page Titles or Page Text

You can search for page titles by adding the term allintitle: directly before your search terms. Then google will return websites whose titles are whatever you were searching for. You can also search only the page text by adding allintext: before your search terms. 

Example:

allintitle:"John Doe" would return pages titled John Doe

I hope that you find some of these tips useful! 

Legacy Family Tree program is currently my program of choice for keeping my family tree organized. I started with the free version then moved on to the deluxe version after I had played with it for a while. I had tried several other programs to keep my tree in prior to finding Legacy. 

There standard version is FREE. Can't get better than that right! Try it out now! 





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Free Genealogy Resources

Looking for free places to search for your ancestors? Here is a list of Free Sites to help you on your quest to find your ancestors.

CyndisList.com - here you will find links to family history news and genealogy research

FamilyTreeMagazine.com - lots of tips for record searches, information about ancestory, free info 

FindAGrave.com - this is a search index of graves by date or location

LibertyEllisFoundation.org - this is a database of over 51 million passenger records

AccessGenealogy - has a large collection of genealogy records


FamilySearch.org - this website is maintained by the Mormon church. It has a multitude of information from birth, death and marriage certs from various countries.


RootsWeb -  I have definitely spent a number of hours on this site. It is one of the larges free resources for genealogy information on the internet. 

USGenWeb - They have records for every state. They have census records, wills and cemetery transcriptions. 

International Genealogical Index aka IGI - has birth, death, and marriage records from North America and the UK

Interment.net - This site offers burial records from cemeteries from around the world. 






Some of our posts may contain affiliate links, which cost you nothing but do help support this site's maintenance and fees. See our full disclosure policy for more information.

Wow it has been a while!

Wow it has really been a while! I have missed searching for my family history. I plan to get back into it and start hunting down some more missing ancestors soon.  I have to try to remember all the ways I used to hunt and track my genealogy. I also need to update my files with deaths and births since I have been in la la land for a bit. I need to get our tree back online also. Currently the links aren't working. Lots to do!

I plan to update the blog with some useful tips and hints on how to go about searching for your ancestors. This will help other people who are searching as well as remind myself of how I went about it in the first place.

Delayed yet again!

Seems my family research has been put on hold yet again due to some business that had to be taken care of. Maybe one of these days I will get time to get back to working on it! *sigh*



Cubecan's Creations

What I'm currently doing

I am in the process of adding new surnames to my Cubecan's Creation store. If you would like to have something created with your specific surname or a specific phrase on it then please let me know by posting a comment to this post. I will let you know when it is ready via email if you leave me your email addy or via the blog. If you would like a more private way to communicate with me you can visit my myspace account and send me a message there.

Get back to digging

Hopefully I will get back to researching the family tree soon.... I'm hoping for this week actually. Just gotta make time in the day. I've been so tired lately and so busy as well. I don't know what I was thinking when I said I would be a GS Leader. I definately wasn't thinking about all the time it would take up... which of course means less time to work on the genealogy. I'm sure I can figure out a nice combination. At least I sure hope so!

I actually have some papers that I need to go over that my wonderful genealogy friend sent me just prior to our move. I didn't bother looking at it before the move because I knew I didn't have time to check the info against what I have already.
Maybe I will do that tomorrow! But I am really anxious to get back to searching for missing links!

Pressley Surname Researchers

There is a new Pressley Family Historian Store at cafepress.

This store is dedicated to the Pressley surname.

Bass Family Surname

Researchers of the Bass surname this one is for you...

Find a ton of gifts & clothing products featuring the Bass Family Surname here
Bass Family Historian

Webring - Give me a BREAK!!!

Ok... webring is really irritating me at the moment. Incase you haven't heard they are making all kinds of changes. From now on for a free account you can only join 5 webrings and you can only manage 2 webrings. WHAT THE #@$%@#$^. .... I am extremely irritated with them at the moment... especially since I manage 38 webrings (genealogy rings, military rings etc) and have 7 different websites in 252 rings.

Seems they are starting an affiliate program now. Still irritates me. It will definately make it harder to find genealogy sites with similar surnames, states or whatever.

For those of you who have a website and you haven't joined webring I do encourage you to at least join and add it to 5 webrings (this is the free option) ...

Genealogy Gifts & Products

If anyone is looking around for genealogy related products... here are some resources

Diggin' For My Roots Family Store

Owens Family Store

Leviner Family Store

Smith Family Store

Another Leviner Family Store

Diggin' For My Roots Family Store part 3

Genealogy Shirts & Gifts

Search Cafepress for Genealogy gifts

No digging going on here.

Well... it has been a very busy couple of months. We finally got moved then we had to move again just 3 weeks later. Finally things are starting to slow down a bit and maybe I can get back to digging up some family history. I miss it like crazy that is for sure. I just haven't been able to find time to work on it.

Need to get to work

Oh how I need to get to work on the family tree again. It has been ages since I actually worked on it. I just can't seem to find the time. I don't know when I will find the time now that I have a move ahead of me as well.

Summer is never good for researching the family tree because the kids are out of school. The past two winters haven't been that great either because my husband was in Iraq. I couldn't quite concentrate on genealogy then because I was way too busy worrying about him.

Hopefully I can get back into things in the not so distant future.

Do you have the genealogy bug???

Ok... just a quick note to get this started....

I have been researching my family tree since 1997. Recently I got my Aunt Donnia hooked too. :)

Visit my website: http://www.always-online.com/owens