Genealogy buffs can find a plethora of information at the GenealogyBuff.com website. You can search through the resources for free. They hope to inspire people to begin, and to continue, researching their family tree. Have you tried this website yet?
GenealogyBuff.com is a great place to find marriage, birth, and death records (listed by county). Search through state and federal census records, immigration records, obituaries, and more. They have advice for people who are brand new to genealogy. Start with yourself, and work backwards. I think this is a great way to begin. You already know, without a doubt, what your full name is. You also know your birthday. It can be good practice to use those two pieces of information to learn how to navigate through the records that can be found on this website. From there, work backwards through your family tree.
I decided to test out this website myself, just to see what results I could get. The website has a big red arrow pointing at the link “Search Central”. Clicking on that brought me to their “Famous Surname Tool”. It says “I want to learn more about this surname” and there is a box for you to enter your surname into. I entered my maiden surname, and instantly, there was a list of links where I could find more information about people who have this same surname.
I decided to go with the link that said “user contributed birth records”, to continue my search for myself. This brought me over to the rootsweb website. Six names were listed. Not one of them was me. I went back to the big page of links, to make another attempt to find myself. The obituary links will not help me, as I am still alive. The marriage links won’t find me either, because I used my maiden name in the original search, not my married name. What’s left? A huge list of links that will provide “general data for the Dahlberg surname”.
I selected the link that led me to FamilySearch.org, because I knew that was a good website. Now, I was looking at a list of people named Dahlberg. Much of it included data gathered from long before I was born, so I skipped over those sections. There were lists of people named Dahlberg from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, all of whom are not me. So much for that. I seem to have hit a dead end.
Backing up, I find a search engine that says it will let me search Ancestry.com’s complete data set. I enter my first name, Jennifer, and my original surname, Dahlberg, in to the box, and click the little button that says “search”. I find a listing that might be me, but, alas, I will have to sign up with the website if I want to see more. This is disappointing. At least it didn’t cost me anything to do these searches!
Image by Hamed Saber on Flickr