Anyone know of a TRULY FREE public records site?
I have been searching for hours now. I wondered if anyone knows of a truely free public records site kinda like Ancestry.com?
Stop and think. If the omelet fairy delivered free breakfasts to everyone every morning, would Denny’s stay in business? If there was a web site just like Ancestry, but free, would Ancestry stay in business?
Here is my copy-and-paste answer for free genealogy. None of the free sites are as good as Ancestry.
There are over 400,000 free genealogy sites. I have a page that has links to some huge ones, below, but you’ll have to wade through some advice and warnings first.
If you didn’t mention a country, we can’t tell if you are in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. I’m in the USA and my links are for it.
If you are in the USA,
AND most of your ancestors were in the USA,
AND you can get to a library or FHC with census access,
AND you are white
Then you can get most of your ancestors who were alive in 1850 with 100 – 300 hours of research. You can only get to 1870 if you are black, sadly. Many young people stop reading here and pick another hobby.
No web site is going to tell you how your great grandparents decorated the Christmas tree with ornaments cut from tin foil during the depression, how Great Uncle Elmer wooed his wife with a banjo, or how Uncle John paid his way through college in the 1960′s by smuggling herbs. Talk to your living relatives before it is too late.
You won’t find living people on genealogy sites. You’ll have to get back to people living in 1930 or so by talking to relatives, looking up obituaries and so forth.
Finally, not everything you read on the internet is true. You have to be cautious and look at people’s sources. Cross-check and verify.
So much for the warnings. Here is the main link:
http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html
It has links to
Cyndi’s List.com – A catalog of 250,000 sites;
Family Search.org – the LDS mega-site;
RootsWeb.com, plus sub-links to
RootsWeb World Connect – almost 600,000,000 entries;
RootsWeb Social Security Death Index;
RootsWeb California Death Index, 1940 – 1997;
Ancestry.com – some of their pages are free, including
Ancestry.com’s page on Surname meanings and origins;
Ancestry.com’s Query boards – 160,000 of them
US Gen Web, with sites for each state and each county within each state;
Superpages.com, a US phone book for looking up living relatives;
Find-a-Grave.com – 35 million entries;
GenForum.com – 50,000+ real genealogy query boards;
My page has links, plus tips and hints on how to use the sites. Having one real link here in the answer and a dozen links on my personal site gets around two problems. First, Y!A limits us to 10 links in an answer. Second, if one or more of the links are popular, I get “We’re taking a breather” when I try to post the answer. This is a bug introduced sometime in August 2008 with the “new look”.
You will need the tips. Just for instance, most beginners either put too much data into the RWWC query page, expect too much accuracy, or mistake the Ancestry ads at the top for the query form. I used to teach a class on Internet Genealogy at the library. I watched the mistakes beginners made. The query forms on the sites are not really intuitive.
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