General

This service is offered by the LDS (Mormon) Church.  It is free, available to members and non-members alike, but you have to sign up and use a personal login when you access it.  The good news is that the Church does not proselytize via familysearch.org; they merely provide this excellent resource as it is a tenet of their religion for all to research their ancestors.  If you access familysearch.org from within the Wimberley Village Library – a “FamilySearch Affiliate” – you get extra access to digitized records you cannot get from home.

You will use two primary functions under the SEARCH menu.  They are RECORDS and CATALOG.  You may end up using other functions including the online family tree, but beware… others have access to data you post and may alter it without your permission.  Familysearch offers a neat function showing you distant famous relatives; beware, these relationships rely on your and others’ genealogical work, which may be suspect.  Still, it might be interesting to learn (?) that you are the 7^th Cousin, 3 times removed, from George Washington or Marie Antoinette.

RECORDS – Enter a name, location, and date and the search function will return all the records it can find vaguely matching your parameters.  With better parameters, the returns get fewer and better.  The records themselves include primary, secondary, and anecdotal information, so be sure to record the sources and use them with care.

CATALOG – This search returns matching items from within the catalogs of all LDS sites, including the famous (and justifiably so) FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, UT, as well as items in various LDS Family History Centers – generally co-located with their churches and available to all onsite – or online digitized records.  The last group will be of the most interest to you unless you are planning a trip to SLC or to an LDS FHC.

There will be items you can only find in their original printed or microfilmed versions, and obviously these will not be at the Wimberley Village Library.  But some items will be available in digital form.  Look for a text entry saying that a digital representation is available or for a camera icon in the location field.  If the camera icon appears, and there is no (!) symbol beside it, you can click on the camera and browse through the digitized images for that item.  This is common for microfilmed records, and you will often see several pages of digitized images.  You can browse through those images (or search using an index, if available) until you find the specific image you want.  And then, you can either transcribe it, or merely save the image for later perusal.   This is available only because your Wimberley Village Library has Affiliate status; otherwise, you might have to visit SLC to see that item.

Ancestry is possibly the best known commercial genealogy services firm in existence.  It offers a range of products, including databases, DNA services, tutorials, forums, etc.  The Wimberley Village Library has purchased a subscription to their Library edition, which you may use free of charge.  However, you must use the subscription from a user computer or wifi-connected device within the building.

We will offer tutorials and DNA information in other documents, so we will not cover those offerings here.  We will focus on their databases.

Like within familysearch, you can enter a family tree and have Ancestry provide hints and records you (or someone else) might attach to your tree.  And like in Familysearch, you have little control over what is done to your tree if you make it public.  But these hints can be useful, and occasionally some outsider will add information to your tree that you had not yet found.  Of course, they can also add incorrect info, so beware.

 But for our purposes here, you will again use the SEARCH function more than most of the other capabilities.  You’re seeking data on your ancestors, and SEARCH will scan all of Ancestry’s zillions of compiled records – records which overlap and occasionally exceed Familysearch’s holdings – for records relating to your people.  As with Familysearch, those records vary in quality, so beware.  Be sure to record the true source of the records you use (other than from Ancestry).

 Under the SEARCH function, there are several categories of data from which to obtain records, including an “all categories” selection.  You enter your search parameters, fire up the search engine, then sort through the returns to figure out which ones match your person.  Pretty typical, and very similar to Familysearch in that regard.

One caveat: remember that Ancestry is a commercial site – they’re in this business to make money.  Familysearch and many of the other databases do their work for other, perhaps more altruistic, reasons.  Ancestry has tailored their offerings and their marketing efforts for commercial success; not a bad thing necessarily, but something of which to be cognizant. 

HeritageQuest is an Ancestry product that offers similar search functionality. From the landing page you can enter your search parameters and search all records they have available, or selected segments, e.g. census records. Because HeritageQuest was purchased by Ancestry after it had already been established, the records it has available will certainly overlap Ancestry’s but may be better in one area or another.

MyHeritage is a paid service, similar to Ancestry.com.  They may offer trial subscriptions, but you are on your own about getting access.  Like all similar services, their records will overlap considerably with Ancestry or Familysearch, but they may have better resources in one area or another.

WikiTree is user-driven forum where one enters (or searches for) information on a given ancestor.  You will find information posted by various researchers, and therefore of varying quality.  Some postings may be queries looking for new information;  some may be informational about that researcher’s family.  You will have to judge for yourself the quality of the information your receive.  At best… you might find a breakthrough.  At worst… it’s information that you will check out and then discard.  Most of what you find can be considered clues for further research on YOUR part.

Practically every printed piece of information in the United States ends up in the Library of Congress. So, if you are searching for that piece of information, this is a likely repository. The downside is that one might have to visit Washington, DC to get access to that item. The upside is that some of the holdings of the Library of Congress are available online. You can access them, download them, etc.

The National Archives are the USA’s repository for historical records. Many of these records are available elsewhere, e.g. via Familysearch, Ancestry, or one of the other aggregators, but NARA may have records the others have missed.

The US GenNet is an aggregator for several sites and allows searches across those sites for specigic information. Much of their info is secondary transcriptions of primary records.

The DPLA has digitized millions of photos, documents, maps, and the like from America’s history.  Want to know something about the Cumberland Gap, or the Oregon Trail, or slave trade in Charleston?  This may be the place to find historical records.

 The USGenWeb Project is a user-supported database divided into individual states and counties.  Users submit transcriptions of various records, which are then housed on the site, available for free to other users.  If you’re looking for tax records for a certain county, you might find them here.  You might find cemetery records, obituaries, or wills not located elsewhere.  It depends on what users have chosen to post.

Newspapers.com is a database of newspaper articles.  Depending on your license, you might have access to the newspaper archives for a city or two, a handful of cities, all of the cities in the USA, cities in Europe, or cities worldwide.  You may search these databases for a number of parameters, perhaps finding your ancestor’s name or historical events on a given day.  You might find an article on your ancestor’s business, or an obit, or a birth notice, or a wedding listing.

Cyndi’s List and Linkpendium are examples of links collections, where the site itself does not provide information, but instead links to other sites which provide genealogical information. That is, if you are looking for a site relating to Texas Cemeteries, you will not find information of that nature on either link compendium, but rather you will find links to websites that DO offer that sort of information.

Linkpendium is much like Cyndi’s List in that it consists of links to other genealogy sites.

Access Genealogy is a free website similar in scope to Ancestry, Familysearch, or HeritageQuest. Again, each will have its own selection of records or foci. Access Genealogy is free to all.

General purpose genealogy compendium like FamilySearch, Heritage Quest, Ancestry, etc.

General purpose genealogy compendium focusing on obits, newspapers, and military records.

General purpose genealogy compendium.