Free government records for your family history.
The US government puts many family history records online free: the National Archives (including the 1950 census), Bureau of Land Management land patents, the National Park Service's Civil War soldiers database, and the Library of Congress's old newspapers. None of them needs a subscription.
Where to look.
| What it holds | Who it helps | |
|---|---|---|
| National Archives | Guides to census, immigration and military records, and the 1950 census itself | Everyone with American family. Start here to learn what exists |
| Federal land records | Images of more than five million federal land title records, from 1788 to the present | Families who homesteaded or bought federal land. These are the public land states, not the original colonies |
| Civil War soldiers | The National Park Service's database of those who served, Union and Confederate | Anyone with men of the right age in the 1860s. It gives a regiment, which leads to the rest of the story |
| Old newspapers | Chronicling America: pages through 1963, from nearly every state | Anyone after an obituary, a wedding or a local story. How to search it |
| Britain's National Archives | Research guides, with free digital microfilm of some records | Families from England and Wales |
Which to try first.
- Start with the census. It shows who lived in the house. How to read one. Earlier years are free on FamilySearch.
- Then the place. A farm family points to land records. A town family points to its newspaper.
- Then the state. Births, marriages and deaths are mostly kept by states and counties, not the federal government. Here's how to find a death certificate.
Why so much is free.
These are public records, kept with public money. A paid site can make them easier to search, and that can be worth paying for, but it doesn't own them. See free alternatives to Ancestry.
Or just ask.
Tell Ancestral Fire 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:
(The published Kennedy file, brought in from the first screen.)
The tree at a glance: 208 people · 75 families · born 1728–1984. Commonest surnames: Kennedy, Bouvier, Caulfield, Mahoney, Skakel, Fitzgerald.
What Ancestral Fire showed seconds after the Kennedy family's published GEDCOM was brought in.
See a whole conversation on How it works, or what it finds in one family: The Kennedy family tree, from Wexford to Dallas.