After you’ve arrived at some of the information that you needed and have narrowed down your ancestor search to various areas, or to a town or county in a given state, you will need to find some more detailed information.

• Find a Specific Site, or Go Live On Location: There are web sites at USGenWeb, or WorldGenWeb where you can find specific counties which are what you’re going to be needing next. Depending on which country you’re interested in you’re going to need county specific information now that you’ve dug a bit deeper into things.- depending upon your country of interest. On GenWeb you can find county histories, family trees, biographies, and a lot of forum postings by others who are working on their own genealogy research,. Being able to ask questions of other genealogy researchers and to access some of their labor may also help you with your own. The forums I’ve found are a plethora of information.

• Check the Library In keeping with the living locations theme, I like to dig next into the web sites that offer historical or genealogical societies in the area I’m interested in. That includes library links, which will give you a wealth of information in a very short time if you know how to delve into them. On most library sites will reside a link to local history or family history that you can click to transport you to other genealogy societies or groups who will usually be pleased to assist you in your ancestor search. Genealogy research is a great deal of work, but also a lot of fun and most of those who are involved in it are eager to help.

• Seek Out Online Forums /Message Boards: Nearly all of these will have a place to put up what you are currently working on and to ask questions of the other users. In most cases you will get great references, good software ideas an sometimes even a forum or message board link where some of your information may be housed in response to your questions. If nothing else you will get someone to talk to who shares your passion for digging into the past and trying to unravel the mysteries of genealogy research.

• Find Others in your Family who are working on the same family tree: In many cases you’ve got some names, dates and a place to start, but don’t stop there. Find out from other family members if someone else has begun or even completely done a family history for the family you are working on. If you work together you can quite often delve a great deal deeper. It’s often been said that two heads are better than one and in this case it is absolutely true. Working together you will accomplish a lot more than if the two of you were working alone, provided that you don’t duplicate your efforts, which you can avoid by deciding who will be tracing which person’s history.

• Of course at this point you’re no longer able to find a great deal on the free sites, and if you still have issues with finding some members of your family and where they were, you may want to unbend enough to try a free trial of one of the for pay genealogy resource sites and see what you can find. If it assists you in your search it may be worth your time to indulge your passion in genealogy research by joining the site for a given amount of time.

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