Ancestry questions.. I know there's been a lot of threads!

www.cogensoc.us/coresearch.php
I think you are in Colorado? This is from the Colorado Genealogy Society. It might point you in the right direction.

I know in Illinois, the secretary of state website has several searchable websites that have been useful to me. Missouri also has some databases online through their SOS.

If you know the area where your ancestors are from, sometimes the local library has resources that aren’t online or has a county genealogical society that has shared their work.

I can also go to the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield and search through newspapers on microfilm, which is kinda of tedious if you don’t have dates. But I have found things I wasn’t even looking for.

I’ve never found a place where you can birth, marriage or death certificates for free but usually the county clerk’s will issue a genealogical copy. It used to be a couple of dollars but that’s been a few years ago.

I’ve had a subscription to Ancestry for a long time and for me, it is worth it. I don’t know how it works in regards to keeping your information after your free month.

Have you checked Family Search I think they have guidelines to direct and plan your search. Have not used them, so I do not know a great deal about them. I also highly recommend a subscription to Ancestry. Totally worth the price, IMO.

I WISH I had a month free at Ancestry.com! They only gave me 14 days and today's the last day! I am signing up for a paid subscription though! I think it's definitely worth it! But my ancestors are VERY hard to find! LOL! Damn elusive natives! Experts at hide and seek!

I haven't been able to find birth/death certificates though. I think you have to write to the agencies and request them and might have to pay a fee. Usually the Town Clerk of where they were born or died could help you with that. But through Ancestry.com, you can find the correct birth/death dates and places, and old SS #'s too.

I tried Family Search.org and couldn't find anything at all! Maybe I should try it again before using a paid subscription at ancestry.com

As far as certificates, you generally have to go through the vital statistics office (sometimes they have separate ones for older/ancestry research) of where the person was from. So you should check out what type of resources Missouri has.

You won't find full certificates and numbers like that available on Ancestry unless another relative posted them. There may be a record showing it exists and you can maybe get a number to make a request.

I'm dealing with NY mostly, so I was able to get enough info off of public sites (mostly from googling) where I could make a request for death certificates from the Brooklyn office, but I had to pay.

That said, Ancestry is still good to have the full use and should help point you in right direction. There are also tutorials and support and message boards to help.

You can have more than one family tree in Ancestory.  I'd export my side of the tree or otherwise edit out dh's side to create a second tree with just the information I was willing to share.

Yes, you can do it with only one master tree. You do not need a program outside of ancestory.
Go to your master tree mangement, export it to your computer desk top, change the file name and re-upload the file as a new tree. You can now edit the information to remove the side of the family you don't want to include.

FYI - I had a private tree that showed on Google searches until I changed the setting for that tree to unsearchable.


Family Search and Ancestry have begun co-ordinating so that some records at Family Search are now coming up as outside links on Ancestry. (Just like the FindAGrave links do.)

I found Oklahoma records at Family Search that Ancestry didn't have, but are now beginning to.


One BIG thing about Family Search are the thousands (millions?) of records that they have photographed that aren't indexed yet.

You can find these different data bases through their search features and then page through them yourself.



Ancestry also has a LOT of records that you can page through that aren't fully indexed. Most notably, for me, have been city directories. The indexes to those are really hit and miss. If you go to the SEARCH feature at the top of the page and scroll down the drop down menu to the CARD CATALOG, click on that and then set the SORT BY button on the top right to POPULARITY, US City Directories will be near the top of the list.

If you click on city directories, you can then type in the state you are most interested in. The page that opens up will be a further search page. On the right side, you should be able to check what areas and years there are directories for. You can choose a particular directory and then page through it just as you would if you were physically looking at it.

When you co-ordinate a city directory with a census, you gain a lot of valuable information that not only tells you where people were at a given time, but also helps you separate different people with the same name. VERY helpful in determining when one spouse dies and the surviving spouse remarries.


You can scroll through a lot more databases than you first appreciate when you first begin by using the search features. So much begins to pop up so quickly that it takes time to get to a feel for the databases that are set to turn up as hints and those you may have to purposefully search for.


There are other city directories that were put out that are NOT included in that City Directory index at Ancestry. Searching for a particular city in a particular state may bring them up, as well as searching for directories through Google. 





Shame you aren't searching in Texas. Texas has the best birth, marriage and death records I've seen yet!   

Some states have put very little online. Each state has their own guidelines and some are very restrictive on what they share.  (Making me secretly wish they were more like Texas.)

Don't be surprised if you find yourself expanding your searches into states you never thought you'd need to look in. People didn't start out in those midwestern states. They started out on the east coast in states like New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Connecticut more often than not.  Depending on when and where they arrived, your folks may have followed migratory paths along with countless others. This was a time when families traveled and settled together for several generations, so you are likely to see a handful of family surnames repeated not only in your family but in their neighbors as well.

A lot of those early records are listed as church records - sometimes even the records from secular cemeteries. 


When you find one of your ancestors in a cemetery that is listed at FindAGrave, check out other people buried in that cemetery with the same surname. Very often, there will be a small cluster of the same surname that turns out to all be from one family. Sometimes, maiden names are included or obituaries or links to other individuals are included that give you the clues you need to tie things together.



Personally, I have found so many birth/death certificates, registrations, indexes and church records that I'd have a pile several feet tall if I printed them all.  I'd have several more feet of military records and other government records like Social Security.

At Ancestry, you can go to the CARD CATALOG as directed above, and instead of typing in a state, type in Social Security. You should get both U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014 and U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007.  The older death index records often have the SSN - and you shouldn't need a subscription to see since they are both just indexes and not actual photos of the records.

No, no, please No!!!  Please don't assume someone else has the correct information.  Ancestry is full of all kinds of errors and folk go along perpetuating them because they think if someone else has posted it it must be right.  Take it as a hint to what might be and check it out for yourself.

I'm glad you are enjoying it, I've been sucked in for over 20 years.  

No! That is an amazing thing.  My sister and I share about 40% ethnicity... then we diverge and each inherited odd groupings the other did not.   

And this same type of thing is why there are gaps in a DNA based family tree.    You could show on paper that you have Greek ancestry several generations back, have your DNA done, and have it turn up no Greek.   But before you start wondering if you made a mistake or that someone was keeping secrets somewhere, you have to realize that it is certainly possible that you simply didn't receive that DNA.  Your mother or father or a sibling could show the Greek DNA, but not you, even though you are most definitely the biological relative of all of those people.  

I haven't done mine yet, but when I do, if I don't get all of the info I need, I'm going to get after my siblings to do it as well.  
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