How to find your great-grandparents, starting from what you know.
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. The U.S. census is released after 72 years, so the most recent one you can search is 1950, free from the National Archives.
1. Start with what your family knows.
Write down your parents and your four grandparents: full names, roughly when they were born and died, and where they lived. Ask the oldest relatives you have, and look for anything with a name and a date on it: a funeral card, a family Bible, the back of a photograph. A maiden name is worth more than anything else here, because it's the name your great-grandparents knew her by.
2. Let your grandparents name their parents.
A death certificate usually asks for the person's parents, and so does a marriage record. An obituary often names parents, brothers and sisters, and the town they came from. Start with the grandparent you know most about, and write down every name the record gives you.
3. Find each family in the census.
A census lists a household together, with each person's age and birthplace, so one entry can show your grandparent as a child living with both of their parents. The U.S. census has been taken every ten years since 1790, and each one becomes public 72 years later: the 1950 census was released on April 1, 2022 and is free to search. Work backward ten years at a time.
4. Check what others have already found.
Someone may already have built part of your family. FamilySearch Family Tree is the largest community family tree in the world and free to use. Treat what you find there as a lead, and check it against a record before you believe it.
Or just ask.
AncestralFire does these steps with you. Tell it one name, and it reads your tree, searches FamilySearch Family Tree once you connect it, and tells you what it found, with the source behind each fact. A real answer:
How am I descended from him?
Your tree shows Patrick Kennedy as your great-grandfather: his son Patrick Joseph Kennedy was your grandfather, whose son Joseph Patrick Kennedy was your father.
From the Kennedy family's published tree, asked as John F. Kennedy.
See a whole conversation on How it works, or what it finds in one family: The Kennedy family tree, from Wexford to Dallas.
Keep reading.
- 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.