Best 5 Online Resources for Genealogy

hey today we are talking about my favorite top five places to go for online genealogy research now this is 2021's version it changes a little bit every year so this is my top five we're going to get into all of that here in just a moment but if this is your first time here my name is connie knox i am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family history research now you should know that there is a newsletter a website and a facebook page links for all of that are in the show notes below especially if you this is your first time here please consider hitting the subscribe button if you're getting value out of this video now i am really trying to get to a hundred thousand uh subscribers uh currently i'm somewhere around 44 000 at the time of this recording i would love to get there with your help if you'd hit that subscribe button i'd really appreciate it all right now we're going to get into those top five here in just a moment i also wanted to point out that there is a handout for this episode boy there's i think it's a good five pages long about all five of these resources the handout is for the information access level channel members if you want to join channel membership hit the join button and you will find a support level in an information access level channel membership it's the information access level that gets the handouts everybody gets early release though if you want to get the handouts individually you can do that over at genealogytv.org the channel members they get all the handouts as they come about every month plus early release and so you can do that there but if you want the individual handouts you can get that over at genealogytv.org all right i hope that's helpful we're going to jump into it right now [Music] okay starting in reverse order with number five is wikitree really uh you ought to be taking a look at wikitree this is new on my list this year because first of all it's free it's a collaborative tree it is created by users like you and me if you are not looking at wikitree you might want to go over there and take a look and see if any of your ancestors are already on the collaborative tree remember there's one giant tree where everybody's contributing to it but what makes it a little different is before you can add somebody you have to have a source as to where you're getting that information now you could your source could be personal knowledge okay but for the most part they're looking for records they want to go okay where are you getting this information now one thing you should know about uh wikitree is that they don't host any records but because people are putting those links in or they're putting information about where they're finding this information it's in the sources let me take let me give you a quick little uh tour here so if you click on my tree it's going to take you to a page that looks like this this is my portion of the tree because i've already identified my profile as hey this is where i am in the tree okay the collaborative tree but when you click through to a specific profile and i'm going to jump over to christopher madsen here and his profile looks like this now some of these images were imported during the wikitree challenge that wikitree invited me as a guest on the show and they did some research for me so i was like very grateful they imported some of the images and documents that i provided them but the cool part is that all of these sources are noted as to where these things are coming from and so i am very grateful to the danish researcher who did this particular one but if you'll notice here this is a family search this census came from family search this census came from family search so people are doing research out there and there's some really cool features here on wikitree hey it's free why not check it out and you can start building your tree and find how you connect to the world tree once you start inputting your information into the tree all of a sudden it might say hey is that ancestor the same as this ancestor in the world collaborative tree if so yes connect them and all of a sudden you may go back several generations so there's some really uh interesting and fun stuff now one of the things i like a lot that there's a little hidden trick here on the wiki tree that i've not seen anywhere else so in the family tree so i went went back here and i'm jumped down to family tree and tools and that takes me to this tab here and when i scroll all the way to the bottom almost all the way to the bottom we have this fan chart here well when you click on that it populates a fan chart now it defaults to five generations i have um increased this to seven generations all you have to do is click this little plus and minus button and i colorized it so let me take a quick look here what i at what my choices were here so i colorized the grandparents so you can see it kind of slice the pie into four pieces and then what i did was i went under this fan settings you can jump down here and say colorize repeats ancestry doesn't do this family search doesn't do this not that i'm aware of it pointed out that i have the same ancestors in two different lines of my tree these are my four-time great-grandparents right which is this is common this happens a lot so my fourth great grandparents john henley and kaziah nixon appear in two different lines in my tree well if you think about that for a moment that means that my great-grandparents nanny winslow and henry henley were second cousins when they married so that's kind of cool you can kind of figure that out um just playing around with it and so that is one of the cool things that i like about wikitree there's there's a lot to learn if you want to get some support let me jump back over here to find support you can click the help and there's a whole list of help here but the g to g is genealogist to genealogist forms which is very helpful also they have the mentors down here if you want to get some help there so i did another episode on wikitree and how to use wikitree i will put that on the screen here now and uh then you can go click on that that link will also be in the description box below all right number four on my list is find my past and so find my past is uh really known for its uk and irish records they do have us and canada and australia new zealand records as far as the uk and irish records i have a little more experience with those record sets than i do with the australian new zealand records because quite frankly i don't have any ancestors in those areas but i do know that the us records and the canadian records are pretty much the same thing you're going to find everywhere because those guys all are you know getting the same census records and social security death index records the same kind of basic package of stuff that you're going to find on most every site family search ancestry all the rest of them they're going to have the same u.s records but they do have unique british records that you're not going to find anywhere else they're known for the 1939 registry um so you know find my pass is one you want to take a look at some of the cool things they have is newspapers now one of the things i like to do is i like to search all records so if i'm going to be searching i'm going to jump over here but they do have newspapers here's the 1939 british registry there's military records the census records land records birth marriage death church education immigration and travel they do have some free options but this is a paid uh subscription service so if you find a record that you want to further investigate it might be behind the paywall so here's what i do if i'm going to search similar to the way i typically search a card catalog is i'll go to this all record sets again that's search and then hit all records and then i will peruse basically by location so if let's say i'm searching in england i can narrow down the city i can narrow down the time frame and then i can see how many records let's just give it a time frame 1800 whole century there so they've got 579 record sets and i really didn't give it a specific area now we're down to 232 record sets so there's quite a bit now you can also sort uh by the number of records from the top down which is always smart because you've got a bigger set of records here and then as you go down so i mean there's there's a lot to play with they do have dna dna is actually provided by living dna on the dna side you can upload your uh dna kit if you want to download it from another uh source and then upload it as a zip file you can do that here if you need help with uh find my past you can click the help menu but i have already kind of in the handout giving you the direct phone number and the email address if you want to contact them directly you can find them there but they do have the get started in faq help hub and so that's it for find my past number three on my list is family search and i really grappled with this because it was number two before in my mindset uh and so i kind of taken it back a little bit to number three and the reason why is because i haven't seen any new innovations there not very many they are adding records still which is a big plus many of you heard me talk about family search before i love family search and so some of the the things that i really like about it is the fan chart the family search wiki you know that if you've watched any of my episodes before that the family search wiki anytime i have a question about where do i find any kind of record in any part of the world the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go to the wiki and i'm gonna start uh searching by location first and i'm going to you know drill in and start looking at what's available in that area so the wiki is a huge one as far as services and what's available this is very interactive the fact that you can you know drill into the county level from here is just wildly helpful this little box is incredibly helpful to give you a quick glance at birth marriage death records and what's available court records there's a lot of stuff here at a glance and then i typically use this as kind of my research plan you know what do i have and what don't i have and you can kind of drill in and find those records in various sources now the family tree is wildly helpful i use the i use the family tree in dark mode you can come over here and invert the colors and i like it in dark mode just because it's easy on the eyes one of the features that i like on family search in the fan tree here is to be able to turn on research helps it shows you data problems it might be somebody was there in this case you have a child born of a mother it might be that the mother's birth their death date ends before the child's born so there would be a problem there maybe this person was married twice and somehow something got misattributed and so that is a quick glance to find problems it also shows you record hints and such so the fan chart is huge the search function is huge the records that um family search has in a lot of cases have been uploaded by members that are searching here as well i have found birth marriage and death records here on family search that i've not found anywhere else so family search is very strong in my mind and so i uh still have it in the top three and i'm debating back and forth whether it should be number two or number three but i'm going to show you what who number two is next okay number two is my heritage and the reason why i bumped up my heritage to the number two position is because of the innovation they've got going on over there plus they keep buying other companies so they keep acquiring more research companies so they are not to be ignored my heritage has got a lot going on now as far as united states records go they have a lot of again a lot of the same records that all the other guys have the census records the social security death index and you know that basic package of u.s records but some of the things that they do have that are unique let's talk briefly about their photo uh enhancement tools now they've got this ability to colorize photos quickly i mean it's like a click of the button once you upload the photograph it's almost instantaneous and it's really not bad it's amazing what they have been able to do they have the enhanced uh photo where you can help reduce some scratches and and add some clarity to an image again not bad for a you know like zero need to know how to do this other than to upload a photo which isn't hard there's the button right there upload a photograph and click an enhance button and that's the results you get what's also amazing to me is the ability to animate a still image oh my gosh i in some cases it's a little creepy it just depends they have keep they keep adding more and more filters to this so there's different movements but there's subtle movements as you can see she's just kind of looking around and looking up and that kind of stuff but it's it's not like you know they're going to go dancing it's just a simple little animation it's just incredibly cool now on the dna side they have tools that nobody else has as far as an all-in-one package kind of website so one of the things that i really like at my heritage dna is in this dna tools section they have the chromosome browser and auto clustering now if you're not familiar with what those are let's start with auto clustering so what auto clustering does is it's the same thing as when you are grouping your dna matches at ancestry except for it does it visually with the auto cluster tool now when you use this tool uh it takes a little bit time for it to generate once you've already uploaded your dna there and again you can download your dna from somewhere else and upload it to myheritage and then run it through this tool and when you open up the tool it will create this animated uh auto clustering and what you can't see in this animation is that these people across the top and the people down the side are your dna cousins and they are the same so the number one position is going to be the same across the top is the number one position in going down so that's why you have this line going this way is because it's it's the same person if you come over to number 10 and come across the number 10 it's the same person but what it's doing is it's comparing all of your dna cousins with other dna cousins and then it's grouping them all together in these nice little clusters so that is the same thing auto clustering is the same thing as dna grouping now the other thing that they have that i find really quite helpful in the tools section is the chromosome browsers and so when you do chromosome browsing i'm going to load up an example here and then i'm going to hide all of the all of the names you can add a bunch of your dna cousins and then you can compare them and once you do that you can see these three people have dna in common with me across the different chromosomes and as you can see right here we triangulate on this area which basically means all of us all four of us that's me and these three people all of us have the same dna at that exact section of chromosome one here is another section where we triangulate all of us triangulate together at these positions and that's 12 centimorgans almost 13 centimorgans worth of dna that is exact so what does that mean that means that you can take those dna segments and actually if you do this enough with enough cousins you can start to rebuild some of the uh lines of your family so if i know that these chromosomes i have in common with a certain line in the family then i know that that that position on chromosome 18 came from my henley line because all of those dna cousins are on the henley line and i could even probably narrow it down even further by my great great grandparents after a while you don't have enough dna to get way back there but you can start kind of slicing up the dna and discovering what part of dna you inherited from what line in the family so my heritage has got some really incredibly cool tools the tree does look a little different it just everything you have to get a little bit used to they also have some more dna tools but between some of the new innovations that they've come up with i have to give kudos to my heritage they really have come a long way with their product okay number one still my top favorite place to research is ancestry without a doubt they have more records what is it i think it's they have 30 billion records 30 billion 30 billion record that's amazing their dna tools are fabulous they do get a little bit of grief from the public for not having a chromosome browser i you know it would be great if they did don't hold your breath from what i understand from ancestry they have no intention of putting a chromosome browser out there anytime soon through lines was a big innovation for them and people through lines is a hint feature it is not your family tree so please you know before you send me hate mail and comments about through lines it makes mistakes just like if you did a search for a record you're going to get a list of records that may or may not be your ancestor through lines is the same way it's built on the back of member trees so if member trees are incorrect through lines might be incorrect as well and then one of my favorite sections i talk about this a lot is to use the card catalog this is my first way of researching any ancestor i don't hit the search button from their profile i might do it later i do clear out the hints first and you know get that low hanging fruit but really that is just a small portion of what they have to offer so i drill into the card catalog i search by location and then add a a date field down at the bottom so that uh down here i'll add whatever era it is that i am researching but for u.s researchers uh ancestry to me is still number one it is easiest to use it has hints everywhere on the platform um in the handout i have given you all of the support for all of these companies all five of them i have given you phone numbers on how to call them directly if you want to and or email them as needed so if you're in a search function like this and you start to type a name and you start getting this auto fill function then it perhaps a lot of times you might just pick that person and and and drop them in to the fields and let it auto populate everything right if you hit search you're going to get a certain number of results but if you're not finding what you want try xing out some of this extra information all of these kids all of this other stuff we don't need that to do a search what you really need is a place and a date and a name that kind of correspond with an event like a birth or a marriage or a death event so if you haven't it doesn't even have to be exact you have an approximate date or a date range you know an approximate place even if it's just the state but really it would help if you have the county so that you can focus in on that and it might be that you get better results now sometimes you auto populate like this you're going to get a smaller amount of records the idea there being that you might get a more focused exactly what you're looking for but if you're not finding what you're looking for there it's not showing up start deleting stuff out of your search go back and refine your search and start xing out some of this extra information that you don't need because you might end up getting more results you know to help you populate a better result field and also know that when you get your results this section at the top is smart filtering now right now i have it turned off and i have it turned off for a reason because if you have it turned on it's not bad to use it but if you are not finding what you want turn it off because if what the smart filtering does is it says okay here in the 1880 census you've already got that in your records so if smart filtering is turned on it's not going to deliver any more 1880 census it's not it's done with that record set and so it's not going to show you anymore but in my case this ancestor was in uh the 1880 census twice he was recorded on both sides of the street because he was living across the street from his father well his father i guess because they were over there so much his father or whoever was giving the information to the census taker put the whole family in there and then when the census taker walked across the street maybe a couple hours later and got to that house he recorded everybody that was in that house so he was in there twice he got counted twice so had i had smart filtering turned on i might not have seen that this is a good example too for things like quaker records or church records where people are in the same record set multiple times and so you don't want to miss those extra times because it helps tell the story of your ancestors so ancestry uh is still my number one pick i love it um it has more records it has more dna kits than anybody else i still think even though they don't have a chromosome browser and they don't have auto clustering the fact that we can use the shared matches tool and we can create groups and we can add our our different ancestors to the different family groups is wildly popular and is very easy to use once you understand how it's how it works and then you can help narrow your focus on the trees within those ancestors in the shared matches tools to wrap all this up ancestry still gets my vote for the number one best online website out there they have more records more dna tools a platform that's relatively easy to use search engines that are unlike anybody else so i think right now for me ancestry is still the top dog in town however they should be looking over their shoulder because my heritage is really coming along uh quickly they're building up their dna they're building up their record sets the innovation that they've got over there is unlike anyone else so uh there you have it i a whole top five for 2021 uh of my top picks uh for online research and boy between all of them you can do a lot of research i know you can't afford to be on all of them you can do free uh research on a lot of them and sometimes you build up uh a list of things that you need to research and join them for a month and then shut it off you know if it's like find my past or something you know you build up all those irish records you need to look up or those uk records and then you know just turn it off after if you can't really uh keep up with it so that's that's my tips for today don't forget there is a handout if you are interested you can get that by joining the channel membership or don't do both you'll be wasting your money or you can go and get them at genealogytv.org now the advantage of being a channel member is you can get you can pick up all the handouts you want just by scrolling through the blog posts on the community tab and uh the you get early release and you just have to go to the community tab to find them alternatively um if you join us on patreon you could do that too you have to be at the 15 level there i think it's called the happy dance level or higher and those get emailed to you directly so every time they come out so i'll leave links for all of that in the description below and well i really appreciate your time today and uh have fun researching your family history [Music] you

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 72,258

Rating: 4.9445601 out of 5

Keywords: Top 5 Places for Genealogy Research in 2021, ancestry, familysearch, myheritage, findmypast, wikitree, best genealogy companies, free genealogy, best genealogy sites free, trace your family tree for free online, family tree, genealogy research, familysearch wiki, free family tree search, Ancestry support, AutoCluster, chromosome browser, smart filtering on Ancestry, DNA, genealogy, genealogist, family history, how to find family history, Genealogy tv, #genealogy, #familyhistory, #genealogytv

Id: BGeeqQb-TQk

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021