Low Cost Genealogy – Quality , but at little or no expense

Intro:  

            Many genealogy are available at little or no cost.  When folks buy an Ancestry subscription they are paying for easy record access and convenience.  The convenience is to have Ancestry or MyHeritage or FindMyPast save all your research in one place and provide a user friendly layout to store it in, with many sites suggesting Hints to further your research.

            FamilySearch is a free service from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  It offers billions on records and the ability to store much of your research. Almost everyone stores their research in a family tree form of organization.  Starting with yourself as the trunk, then branching into two main branches for your parents, then four branches for grandparents, eight branches for great grandparents.

This is how a typical tree starts.  We offer tree templates for free on our site that you can use if you want to track your research on paper.

          Millions of folks doing genealogy in the past (Pre computer) would store these paper trees in notebooks making a new root for each person.  They would stuff photos in their notebooks, as well as copies of records such as birth, death, marriage, probate, cemetery, etc.  You can see how it could be to have lots of notebooks stuffed to the brim with finding things later a problem.

Enter computers:  Computers allow us to save digital images of vital records (birth, death, etc)  as digital copies rather than paper copies.  So you can search FamilySearch.org online and locate a death certificate.  Print it if you want the paper copy (perhaps for your very close relatives), but for your 4th cousin it is convenient to just download the .jpg or .pdf copy and store it in digital format.

          If you do not want to pay for a subscription service, what is the easiest way to organize your research at low cost?  You could just create a series of directories on your computer, creating subdirectories for each relative as you add them.  For example, my mother’s maiden name is Dennis, so I have a directory Dennis.  The subdirectories under Dennis are Splittgerber (my grandmas’s maiden name) and Roy (my grandpa’s name).  In those directories I have documents and also family photos.  I also keep a tree on Family Search and one on Ancestry, but you don’t need to use those services to be a good genealogist.

          I recommend starting out using FamilySearch to start building your tree and store as much on their site as you can.  You can upload photos to people in your tree and use a windows directory scheme to store data on your computer.