New Family Search Features

For those who use Family Search for their researching like I do, will find a few changes when they log in.
Quite a few records have been updated these past few months including marriage and death records. My family ties are in New York so I was so excited to be able to see the names of my great grandparents on my father's side. Until now we did not know his great grandmother or if we were sure of his great grandfather's first name. Lots of holes were filled in. Being they were from Germany I wasn't able to go back too far but I will continue to research. I was even able to find out when some of his family died and where they are buried. Just wish they were buried a little closer.
The next big change was being able to search not only on the Family Search website when researching a particular relative, but now we can also research Ancestry, Find My Past, and My Heritage. Now these other sites have subscriptions but when you use the link from your relatives page to search it does give you search results. This may lead to a little snippet of info that you did not have before. I have been able to get some more info on my family just by doing this.
I hope you find this useful and have luck with your research.

Free Sites For Genealogy

Most of our sites here on Frugal Genealogy are going to be free sites to use for genealogy. If it is a paid site it is there only because you will be able to search the site and get a little information for free.


Pixlr:  The most recent site we found was a photo editing site called Pixlr. This site you can scan those old negatives you have and then switch them to a photo to use digitized or to print out all for free. You don't even have to download any software to use this as it is used right from the site itself. This is also great for some of us who collect vintage photos from flea markets and garage sales. Some only have the negative or tins for sale. So this will be a great program to use to bring these back to life. Maybe with your help some may even find their way back home where they belong.

Newspapers: If you look on the right hand side of our site here you will see a link for Newspapers. These are free sites to look up newspapers that are digitized online. You can find obituaries, wedding announcements, birth announcements and just any kind of news. Most places back in the day would post in their local paper who was visiting who and if they were going or coming back from a trip. Some even had announcements of divorces or even criminal news. The links we have are not the only ones out there as we will be adding more as we find more. You can always help by commenting down below or at our facebook page if you find any free sites we don't have listed.

Speaking of our site check out the right hand side for other links to many sites where you can find free information for researching. As always if a link is broken just let us know on our facebook page and we will fix it as soon as possible.

Using Wild Cards

Did you know you can use "wild cards" in researching some of the genealogy sites? With Ancestry.com you can search by using two characters. The first one is "?" ( without the quotation marks ). This is great to use if your ancestor's last name could be spelled differently down the years like one of mine Weed, Weede Wede. Entering lets say Weed* or Weed? can bring up different results you might not have found.
Using the "*" to at the end will bring up different spelling like with the name Ann, Ann* ( Anne ) and so on.

When using Google search you can search by putting the persons name you are looking for in quotation marks like this:
"John Smith"
This way it won't just pull up "John" or everything with the name "Smith". You can even be more specific by Entering it this way:
"John Smith New York"
This also works with dates too. Even looking up obituaries.

So give it a try and see if this helps narrow down your searches.

Don't Forget!

Don't forget to look over marriage certificates that you have of your family. The witnesses actually might be related. The same with christenings and baptismals. I found this out with my great grandmother's certificate.

Look at the names. Not sure who Stephen Saunders is but I found that last name in other probate papers. And Marguerite Bourke is related to Bridget my great grandmother. Always check over every detail. And in some cases if it doesn't make sense at the time come back to it later. 

Updated February 28, 2014 Florida Links

I have updated and added Florida State links under the United States Links. Found a bunch of military sites which I hope are helpful to everyone.

Don't forget to check out my twitter feed on this page for the latest links I have found.