Just out of curiosity. I don’t have a real need for this.
So I’ve been trying to find info on my great-grandparents but after snooping around in ancestry.com and familysearch.com I realise there are no records for any of my parents, grandparents or great grandparents online. At least not on those sites.
And so I’m here wondering, what happened with those records? Anyone had any luck searching elsewhere? I’ve tried googling the names and nothing comes up either. Hooray for privacy I guess?
I like the collaborative nature of https://www.wikitree.com/
It has less than the two mentioned though, for now.
It’s fucked up, but you could try the Mormons. They do this thing, retroactive conversion, so someone becomes Mormon, and they go back and make all that person’s ancestors “Mormon”. So they have incredibly good ancestry records. Just a thought.
ancestry.com is mormon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry.com#1983)
wouldn’t be surprised if many other such resources also are. for the exact reasons as you explain. these people love “converting” the dead to their religion. they offer much less resistance than the living.
Huh…TIL!
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Well, some places found that scanning the originals and providing them online not only saved money storing them, but also improved access. For other places, it’s a matter of going to the town clerk (or equivalent), filling out some forms, and waiting - sometimes months.
I’ve been doing genealogy for my family and friends for a few years. Can I ask what part of the world your ancestors lived in? I find there is almost always some online documentation for any given person (after 1800 or so - depending on the location), but finding it is a complex acquired skillset that can take quite a while to learn. It seems likely you have the opposite of beginners luck - aka a steep curve. Of course, some more rural parts of the world can lag in documentation, and language issues are always a problem. You may really have invisible ancestors. Without more info, it’s hard to give more advice.
Also, there is a significant difference between paid and free accounts on Ancestry. FamilySearch can be hard to use. WikiTree has no research tools, but does have a large tree and a supportive user community. There are a lot of sites, some completely free, and some with tiered membership. Finally, a DNA test (not 23&Me) can be a huge boost to what you are able to find.
Recently, I have been contemplating going pro and charging folks. If you are interested, I can look into yours for free, to see if (1) I’m good enough, and (2) I’m not just lucky in that I’ve only had easy challenges up to now. Assuming that this is a place where the documentation would be in English. So far my experience is US, Canada, UK, and some Italy. Drop me a PM. I work in financial IT - confidentiality has been critical my whole life.
Argentina. Most likely record keeping and digitization is just crap.
I don’t know if I can be bothered with dna, but thanks for letting me know. Also appreciate your offer but I really don’t feel comfortable. If I ever change my mind I’ll let you know!
I know bro. cries in Latin American
Lloremos juntos hermanito
It depends on where they were from. If the big repositories don’t have the data (and you have clearly tried them) then:
- The data may have been destroyed or never written down. I am ¾ Irish but landing any of my ancestors in Ireland has been hard. The records burned in 1916 and, in some areas, there are gaps during the Potato Famine when no-one was around to write things down. One of my best DNA matches on my Mum’s side falls foul of the latter as we have matching surnames and know pretty much when and where our connection would be but the parish records just stopped in that period.
- It’s not in English. They are doing their best to fill such gaps but adding translation in can be hard. There are often regional family record offices but they may be in a language you don’t speak (I’m having trouble tracing my sister-in-law’s grandmother who was born in Estonia. I am also helping a friend whose grandfather was born in Malaysia and it is tricky even working out where to look). Scandinavian genealogy tends to be excellent, but you may need access to the “farm books” where the records are kept.
- It’s paywalled elsewhere - Scottish records need you to subscribe to a specific site.
- The names are badly transcribed - the British record keepers clearly struggled with some Irish names especially when being told them by illiterate peasants (possibly not helped by some being in Gaelic). I have one family whose name is written over a dozen different ways and it can be hard piecing it together. The names settle down after a bit (there was a big push for literacy in the late 19th Century) but there are two branches of the family that ended up with two different spellings of their surname.
Or any other issues. Without details it is tricky to point you in any specific direction.
If you hit a wall, try DNA.
My family tree has Latin American, Spanish and Italian roots. The Italian part before emigration is easy, but anybody else is invisible
Yeah, that’s tricky - I have Italian DNA matches (although they go back to the late Bronze Age) and my cousin married an Italian woman, so have had a nose around some Italian family trees and they seem to have solid records. I don’t know about Spanish or South American records.
Going by this discussion (warning: it’s on The Bad Place) (see also this discussion), there are good Spanish records but you’d need to talk to someone with expertise on where to look for the specific records you need. It may be worth tracking down Spanish language genealogy sites or try general ones and see who you can find - I have great luck with RootsChat who have a Europe board on their forum (although I was mainly after British help).
Yeah, it’s not Spain but Argentina which is absolute chaos. I’m 99% confident the records are still on paper and getting chewed by rats in some moldy basement. It’s OK.
I did familysearch.org (the Mormons), free and it’s great at tracing back documented lines to Europe, dead ends on any native or island ancestry but what I realized doing it is that trying to say you have some sort of bloodline is utter nonsense, we all have too many ancestors for that to be true.
They won’t push records for anyone living either, so you would need names for dead ancestors.
Here only those data are available for search that are older than 100 years in case of birth certificates and maybe 50 for deaths. So you would need to know at least your grandparents’ birth data to start…
Not everything is on the Internet. Even most information from as recent as the 1980s isn’t. A not insignificant percentage has been digitized (this is an ongoing effort), but this doesn’t mean you can just google it or access it through a website.
If you know where and when your ancestors lived, hit up local, regional and national archives. Church and municipal records, national surveys, newspapers (useful for announcements of births and deaths alone), school and university records, etc. You’d be surprised by how much you can find this way. If you’re living too far away to visit in person, give them a call. Archivists are very helpful people by nature and occupation.
