AncestralFire · Guides
Family history, for beginners.
Plain answers to the questions people ask when they start, each with its sources, and the easy way to do it.
- How to find your great-grandparents. You have eight great-grandparents, and you can usually find them in three steps: write down what your family already knows, find your grandparents' death certificates and obituaries (they usually name their parents), then find each family in a census, where they're listed together in one household.
- What is a GEDCOM file, and how to get yours. A GEDCOM file (.ged) is your family tree saved in the one format every family-tree program understands: every person, date, place and relationship, as plain text.
- How to use FamilySearch, and what to ask it. FamilySearch is free: there's only one kind of account, and it costs nothing.
- How to find where your ancestors came from. Work back through your family until you reach the person who arrived, then look for the three records that say where they came from: the census, which asked about immigration in 1900 through 1930; the ship's passenger list, which U.S.
- Start a family tree from almost nothing. Start with yourself and go back one generation at a time: your parents, then your grandparents, writing down only what you know and where you learned it.
- Is AI genealogy accurate? What to check. It can be, when it answers from records and says which ones.
- Second cousin once removed? Work it out. A second cousin is someone who shares a set of great-grandparents with you, and "once removed" means you are one generation apart: your second cousin's child, or your parent's second cousin.
- How to read a census record. A census record shows one household on the day the census was taken: who lived there, how old they were, where they were born, and more questions as the years went on.
- How to find an ancestor's death certificate. A death certificate is kept by the state or county where the person died, not the federal government, and not necessarily where they lived or were buried.
Or skip the steps: connect your tree, and AncestralFire does them with you, with the source behind every fact.