Ugh I hit a brick wall! How do I even begin to trace my family tree when it seems so overwhelming? Whether you are starting the process of uncovering your past or hitting a brick wall as a more advanced genealogist, there are wonderful tools out there to help. One of the best is Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Legacy Family Tree Webinars are offered every Wednesday and sometimes on Fridays as well. They are absolutely free! Not only do they offer free webinars abut they give away wonderful door prizes at the end of the Wednesday webinars – everything from guides to books to software to webinar memberships. They do offer a membership level for $9.95/month or $49.95/annually. The membership allows you to go back and watch over 500 hours of educational webinars, gives you the syllabus for the webinar, and discounts.
So you’re ready to learn from a free webinar, what now? Go to https://familytreewebinars.com/ and see what they have to offer. I wrote about books last week. Check out Lisa Louise Cook’s “Google Books: The Tool You Should Use Every Day” in mid-July. Great clues to help in tracing your ancestors back further come from Mary Hill’s “Southern States Migration Patterns” in mid-October. The webinars offer everything from general topics like using censuses in Mary Kircher Roddy’s “Censational Census Strategies” to more specific topics like Charles Fritz Juengling’s “Beginning Danish Research” or Jane Wilcox’s “New York City and State Government Vital Records”.
Maybe there is not a webinar that you are particularly interested incoming up, but you just can’t wait to start learning. You’re not sure yet if membership is right for you, because let’s face it researching your family tree can be financially daunting with so much being offered out there. Great news, there are some free webinars out there at https://familytreewebinars.com/archived_webinars_free.php. A great free tool for researching is familysearch.org. If have not yet started using it, or even if you have and want to make sure you are using all the tools it has available, Devin Ashby offers “How to Use FamilySearch.org for Beginners”. Maybe you are interested in using GenealogyBank, a paid subscription, but are not sure your money will be well spent. Check out Tom Kemp’s “GenealogyBank – The Power of Finding Our Ancestor’s Stories”.
Legacy Family Tree also offers a free downloadable copy of their family tree software with the newest being Legacy 9.0. Of course, there are webinars to each you how to use it!
Legacy Family Tree Webinars are a great learning source, but there are many more out there which are free as well. North Carolina Genealogical Society has offered free webinars in using the State Archives. AmericanAncestors.org also offers a variety of free webinars in addition to their paid ones. Most who are researching their family line use Ancestry.com. There are quite a few videos on YouTube that will lead you through the process of using Ancestry that are from Ancestry.
No one can hope to successfully trace a family line without learning about the tools that are out there. Start with these free resources to make your own search more enjoyable and more productive.
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