How to use FamilySearch, and what to ask it.
FamilySearch is free: there's only one kind of account, and it costs nothing. Make an account, add yourself and the relatives you know, and FamilySearch Family Tree, the largest shared family tree in the world, will often connect you to ancestors other people have already found. Then check each one against the records attached to them.
1. Make a free account.
You can search some of FamilySearch without an account, including the catalog and the Research Wiki, but an account opens everything else. FamilySearch says it plainly: there is only one type of account, a free one.
2. Start with yourself and the people you know.
Add your parents and grandparents. Mark the living as living, since FamilySearch keeps living people private. Once someone in your line who has died matches a person already in the shared tree, everything relatives have added about them, going back generations, comes with them.
3. Read the sources, not just the names.
Every person in Family Tree can carry sources: a census, a birth record, a grave. A name with no sources is someone's guess. A name with three records that agree is a person you can stand behind.
4. Ask better questions.
"Who are my ancestors?" is too big to answer. "Where was my grandfather living in 1940?" or "Who were my great-grandmother's parents?" can be answered with one record. The Research Wiki has a guide for almost every country, state and county, saying which records survive and where.
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:
I'm Eunice Kennedy. I'd like to meet my dad's father, Patrick Joseph Kennedy.
I'm your family-history partner here; we'll start with what you know, then look for public records for relatives who've died. I added Eunice Kennedy as the center of your tree and noted Patrick Joseph Kennedy as your dad's father. To look for him in the free shared FamilySearch Family Tree, sign in here…
A new account's first answer, before FamilySearch is connected.
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.
- 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.