Using Genealogy Websites

What do you do when you know your subjects name and nothing else? Try researching their family history. A genealogy site such as ancestry.com or footnote.com can be very helping with finding information such as relatives or birth dates. A quick search of the subjects name may return birth and death information as well as parents and siblings names and birth dates. Birth information often shows not only the exact birth date, but also where they were born and and the name of there parents. This can be beneficial because many people have family in the towns where they were born. A search at Zabasearch, U.S. Search or Whitepages.com could return names of people who share the same last name and live in the area. You could also search the parents names and perhaps find them as well. Death information can be useful as well. The ancestry.com website can search the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) to tell you if your subject or their parents are deceased. This information will tell you the last location of their benefits. You can then search local obituaries for any information that could help you locate your subject. Ancestry.com will also search old phone directories and possibly return old addresses and phone numbers. This information may still be current. Another benefit of these sites are that many people post their family histories on these sites. A simple search may find that your subject is listed in a member's family tree. You may then be able to contact the person and find out more information on your subject. Ancestry.com and footnote.com offer some free searches. However for more detailed searches, an inexpensive subscription is required. These subscriptions can be by the month or year and both offer free trial memberships. These sites are very valuable to any researcher and may be a necessity to any search. You can find links to the sites mentioned to the right of this post.