Online Family Trees
This might sound discouraging at first, but there is a good chance you
will not be able to find your ancestor in an existing online family tree.
It all depends on someone else having researched your genealogy and
posted the family tree to one of the sites on the Internet. Nevertheless,
it is always worth a try to find existing trees. Here are the
sites with the most family trees for you to search. Each will open a new
browser window so that you can continue to refer to this page if you are
unable to find trees online or if you determine that the documentation of
the online trees is insufficient.
-
Ancestry.com
- Computerized Ancestor
- FamilySearch.org
-
GenCircles
-
Genealogy.com
- GeneaNet
-
MyTrees.com
-
OneGreatFamily.com
Another option is to try the
Family Tree
Searcher. At that free site, you can enter you ancestor information
just once to search each of the sites listed above.
Finally, Ancestry.com has an interesting interactive feature that will
automatically search their extensive data for matching information as you
add to your family tree online.
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Documentation of Family Trees
If you are able to find a family tree online, be careful to examine the
documentation that goes with the tree. Unfortunately, many trees are not
documented well. Just because a tree is posted online, does not mean
it is accurate. You should not take it a face value. Instead, you can
treat online trees as "big hints" for places to look.