i know there's countless websites out there that will let me trace my family back generations and generations but i ain't trying to spend $$$ on something that i should be bale to find for free. just wondering if anyone knows of a website or maybe a public archive in raleigh that would let me piece together a family tree that goes back further than just poepl at the reuion.

7/12/2007 7:34:10 PM

Find out all you can about your immediate family, then find out what city/county their parents, grandparents, etc. were from. You can usually find census records and birth/death certificates back quite a few years. Once you establish a lineage a few generations back, you can trace a lot of distant relatives just through public records. You'll find that just meeting and talking to relatives can turn up a LOT of things that you might not find any other way. Family Bibles are another good resource for genealogy research.

A lot of your research for free will entail doing the legwork yourself - you'll have to visit libraries and courthouses where old public records are on microfilm and stuff, and just do it by hand. Once you really get it worked out, you'll find that paid resources sometimes turn up little details that you would never have found otherwise.

It's a lot of fun - I've watched and helped my dad do it for years, and we've got a fairly accurate and complete family tree for several generations back. If you do it cheaply, it's not necessarily fast, or easy, but the sites that charge usually enable you to do it more quickly and painlessly.

7/12/2007 7:46:35 PM