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The best FREE family history websites to use

Over60 community member and avid family historian, Di Rieger, shares the best (and free) genealogy websites she uses for her own research. 

Genealogy SA: helping find your family history contains a number of databases that are free to search for both members and non-members.  There is a website login so that members can gain access to discounts and extra information stored online.  Non-members can register a new account (during the check-out process) to purchase transcripts and research services online. The databases that can be searched include birth, death and marriage indexes; newspaper birth and death Notices, and South Australian cemeteries. Basic information for the person contains the year, district and registration number of the event.

Billion Graves: Cemetery & Headstone Records is a free website to look up headstone photos from around the world.  Photos can be easily accessed for research online.  You can search for your ancestors’ graves using the easy search facility.  You can access their headstone records, photos of headstones and accurate locations of all the graves.

I found this headstone of one my relatives using the site.

WikiTree is a free, shared social networking genealogy website that allows users individually to research and contribute to their own personal family trees, while building and collaborating on a singular worldwide family tree within the same system.

Australian Cemeteries is a gateway site to all knownAustralian Cemeteries. Organised by state, it may provide links to contact information, online data, home pages, look-up volunteers, undertaker’s data, transcript links, headstone photographs and maps, if available, for each cemetery listed. Cemetery records often give more information than church burial records and may include the deceased’s name, age, date of death or burial, birth year or date of birth and sometimes marriage information.  They may also provide clues about an ancestor’s military service, religion, occupation, place of residence at time of death, or membership in an organisation.  Cemetery records are especially helpful for identifying ancestors who were not recorded in other records, such as children who died young or women. Some grave photos are available to be emailed to you on request at no charge.   

You can also find all of the above listed organisations on Facebook.

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Tags:
family, history, Community contributor