Find ancestors online
Discover how to track down your ancestors – and their records – online for free.
YOU’VE RECORDED WHAT you know about your family, but where do you go to track down missing information as well as the names of ancestors from further back in your tree? First, you’d be surprised what records exist – not just birth, marriage and death records, but all kinds of records to flesh out hitherto anonymous ancestors with a rich seam of detail about their lives.
The days of hunting through dusty records in far-flung archives and parish churches for these records is long gone too, with everincreasing numbers being digitised and made available online. And thanks to volunteer efforts like the Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes coupled with the global
FamilySearch website, many records are now completely free.
SIGN UP WITH FAMILYSEARCH
You’ll need to register with FamilySearch to access its free records – go to
and click ‘Create your free account’ to do so. The website is split into several sections for now, select Search to search the website’s historical records. The more information you can provide, the more focused your results will be, but if you go too narrow you may end up getting no results at all. Check the box for tips on how to track down those elusive ancestors.
What sort of records should you be looking for? All websites – including FamilySearch – will give you access to the birth, marriage and death indices – these can also be searched separately at and so on – which can provide you with varying amounts of information about the events in question. For example, you won’t get an exact date of the birth, marriage or death, but simply the quarter it was registered, and a rough location of where it took place. This information can then be used to order a certificate containing the precise information you’re looking for – for instance you can do this through the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, where a certificate will cost from $35.
FamilySearch acts as a central place for searching lots of records normally hidden behind subscriptions. The downside is that you only have access to a transcription rather than a digital image of the scanned document itself, but you can still go a long way before you need to think about paying out for a subscription to the likes of Ancestry
( www.ancestry.com.au) and Find My Past ( www.findmypast.com.au) – FamilySearch makes it clear with each record set where you’ll need to go to find the images.
Highlights on FamilySearch include many databases from around the world, like transcripts for all UK census records from 1841-1911, military records, and various parish records for christenings and burials. We’ll take a look at other websites in more detail in the final pages of this feature.
LINK WITH ROOTSMAGIC
It’s possible to link the people in your RootsMagic tree with their equivalents on FamilySearch – once linked, you’re able to swap data between the FamilySearch website and your own tree, making it easy to incorporate records you find on FamilySearch in your research.
The first step involves linking your FamilySearch account to RootsMagic. Select ‘Tools > File Options > FamilySearch’, tick ‘Enable FamilySearch support’, enter your FamilySearch credentials and click OK. Return to the main Pedigree view and you’ll see a little greyed out FamilySearch icon appear next to each person in your tree. Click this and the FamilySearch Person Tools box will appear, attempting to match that person with their equivalent on FamilySearch.
A list of potential matches will appear based on the information in your tree compared to that online. Click the ‘i’ next to a promising match to review the link in more detail. If you’re happy you’ve found a definite match, tick the person’s entry and click ‘Match with FamilySearch’ to make the link. You’ll see the match is confirmed, but other possible matches may continue to be displayed – in case you subsequently decide you’ve picked the wrong person and want to switch.
Once you’ve matched someone, click Close and you’ll see the greyed-out icon next to their name turns blue. You can now move on to the next person in your tree and continue matching people one at a time or follow the step-by-step guide for a quicker way, which also allows you to download facts from FamilySearch at the same time. You can also upload facts from your tree to FamilySearch to share with others from here, plus download ‘new’ people you’ve not yet added to your tree from here too – in both cases, just click the FamilySearch icon next to the relevant item to do so.