A Guide to Free Genealogy Databases

Free genealogy databases are becomingoutside these areas if you think you have gotten
increasingly common and loaded with information.stuck somewhere and unable to proceed further
Any research of your family tree invariablyon a branch.
makes use of these databases to track down- Commonwealth War Graves Commission
ancestors and a host of other related information.maintains a website cwgc.org that provides the
It is not very difficult to find out free genealogydetails of the soldiers from the Commonwealth
databases but there are so many of them that it(and the colonies of UK included) who died during
can become difficult to track them down. Thethe World Wars. You can thus get lots of
following guide will help you get started.information about your ancestors who might have
- has a World Connect Project that allows peopledied in the Wars. This can generally be a
from across the globe to submit their family treesbottleneck in the tree, and finding such an
and information, along with the sources. This isancestor can lead to the discovery of a whole
one great place to start your search as there is abranch, so it can get very helpful at times.
lot of information available. Since it is posted by- For US citizens and those with a part of their
users, there is an added advantage of diversityfamily tree in that country, Heritage Quest Online
across nations (many databases can be verycontains a wealth of information including complete
country specific). There may be a few cases offederal census data for more than 200 years.
errors so might want to validate the informationApart from this, it contains war pension files and
here through authentic citations.other information that would be otherwise difficult
- Interment.net maintains records from thousandsto obtain. The only drawback is that it is
of cemeteries totaling millions of people fromaccessible only through library membership in the
across the world. There are also helpful resourcesUnited States or through other genealogical
linking to other cemeteries to supplement yoursocieties. Also, the files are present as images and
research. This is a very helpful resource that youthus it takes more time to search.
would often use to track dead ancestors.It is worthwhile to remember that information not
- WorldGenWeb is an ambitious project that aimsfrom official sites maintained by governments and
to collect a huge amount of genealogical datalibraries should be verified before using it. This
from all over the world. The best thing is that youshould not in any way deter you from using free
would find a lot of information and sources in allgenealogy databases, however The errors are
countries and not just US, Western Europe andnot all that common and they more often than
Australia as is the case with many freenot at the very least provide a clue and direction
genealogical databases. Therefore this record canfor your research. The verification is in most
be especially useful for parts of your family treecases only to authenticate your research.