Genealogy Links

Why research your family’s history? Many reasons: to satisfy your curiosity about your ancestors, to see if family stories are true, to pass information to your family, to learn your family’s medical history, to join a lineage or heritage society, for religious reasons, to write a family history! Identify your reasons.

Vital Records help establish the “framework” for your ancestor’s life. Once you have set up this framework you will go back and fill in information you find about the person from family stories, newspaper articles, and other sources.

The census helps you know where to look for other records. This guide will include the following information about census records: ● What census records are and why they are important to researchers. ● How census records were published in the United States. ● What types of information were recorded in the different censuses. ● How to find Federal and State census records.

In this final part, we feature additional resources you might use to delve deeper into genealogy, learn more about sources and searching techniques, and/or get help. Add “genealogy” to Internet search terms like courses, podcasts, videos, blogs, newsletters - you get the picture.

The Free Genealogy Resources section includes helpful tips, articles, and recommended resources for every level of family researcher whether you are Getting Started, Going to the Next Level or working at Building Advanced Skills. And for those who are not NGS members, there is a sampling of beneficial articles from NGS Magazine, NGS Quarterly, and NGS Monthly. Resources include genealogy charts, templates, and tutorials.

This free site provides a clearly structured landing page for each country in the world: key information, crucial links and a recommended site for further in-depth research. Thus, the landing page is a gateway to the many WorldGenWeb country sites that are individually hosted by volunteers.