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Hi Ted
Thank you very much for replying to my post. My friend is just starting to research her American side of the family and I have said I would help her. She is awaitng the arrival of a birth certificate from New York, I think, but I haven't any details yet.I shall get in touch if she has any connections with your area.
Thank you very much for the kind offer of help. It is appreciated.
Kind regards
Diana
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Hello Diana/ It would help if you could localize the area in North America. I am in Ottawa, Canada. I have 5 generations from 1634, of Great Grandparents resting in Essex County Mass (Boston and North)
I have done extensive work in Essex county and Nantucket.
If this is your area of interest, I may be of help re supporting documents and book histories. Look at the Tip request just above yours, Aye, Frederick A.W. (Ted) White
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Hi Kathryn B, Richard and Lisa J,
Thank you so much for all your very helpful advice and suggestions. I am sorry for not replying sooner but it was bedtime for me!
It was so kind of you all to give me all that info. I have mainly Scotttish ancestors so knew little about other systems. My friend is researching her father's family in America who she has had little contact with so all information has to come through official channels rather than by family.She has had a 3 month trial on Ancestry but wasn't too sure of it. I shall play around with it in our local library once I know what she is looking for.
Many thanks again
Diana
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If you don't mind others looking for you (I generally like to find my own information and usually just ask here when I'm at wit's end), people would be happy to check American census records for you.
Living in California, yet not having any American rellies or ancestors, I've resorted to using google for a lot of things. If you are looking for uncommon surnames, you could use google or a similar search engine, and type something like: "John Ovens" merchant 1813. I've found out a bit about English ancestors that way, and also a little bit about my Canadian rellies.
PS I've done what Kathryn suggested (for Canadian rellies) and it does work.
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The 1880 and now also the 1900 USA censuses are on FamilySearch, for free. For the 1900, you have to use the new familysearch site: http://search.labs.familysearch.org (you have to register, but it's free). This new site also has some other useful data, mainly for USA. It's in its infancy at the moment but the LDS have big plans for it.
As Kathryn said above, for BMD's it will depend largely on which state they were living. Some states have online indexes, but many do not. The available time periods vary considerably between states, too. Once you have a better idea of the specific state(s) that they were living, ask again on here.
Richard
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Diana -- you can play with ancestry.com even if you aren't a paying user. You can do all the searches in all the databases, you just can't see the details of results.
For instance, here's one I'm looking at now. I looked in the 1900 census for surname Gard* in Texas, born in England. A sample of the results:
John T Gardener
name
city, Brown, Texas
abt 1840
England
White relation
So it won't tell me the parent's/spouse's name, the name of the city, or the relationship to head of household. Or the place of birth -- unless I guess any of those things right, which I did in the case of England because that's what I was looking for.
Otherwise, everything works just as it does when you use ancestry.co.uk with a subscription.
I'd recommend playing with it like that for a bit so you get an idea of what the databases are and what info they contain. You'll probably want to subscribe, you'll just have some questions answered before you do it.
If you do, see whether doing what I do works. I'm in Canada, but I subscribe for UK records only through the .co.uk portal. If I went through the .com portal or the .ca portal, I wouldn't be able to do that.
It might be that subscribing for UK and US records separately, instead of the great big entire universe package, would be cheaper.
Depending on how long you're going to be using it, you might want to look into the pay-per-view option. For the small cost, you get full searching privileges, I think it's for two weeks -- all the details. You get a fixed number of accesses to images, but as long as you haven't used them up, you keep your access to the search function until the time is up. I can't check prices for that because the stupid site recognizes me even if I log out of .co.uk or .ca, and won't give me those options.
As far as access to BMD info etc -- the US is like Canada and Australia in two ways. Registration is decentralized -- each state has its own records, and I'm not even sure that they're centralized in every state.
The US also applies much stricter privacy laws than the UK in most regards, I believe, but not to the extent of Canada and Australia. The 1930 census is available, e.g. And the social security death records are searchable, and are a single database because that's a federal program.
When it gets to certificates, I'm no use, but I would expect that you would order them from the authority that holds the records.
And as usual, I don't think there's really any alternative to Ancestry.
Go mess around with it and get a feel for it, and you'll have an idea of what you'll be getting for all that money. ;)
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Hi Von
Thank you for replying to my post. I was just not sure where to start.
My friend has sent off for her father's birth certificate so I presume she shall gain some information from that. Are American records searchable like ours are or is there a lot more privacy laws?
Any suggestions of some reasonably priced websites similar to GRO as we are not sure if we are going through the right channels?
Many thanks
Diana
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I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice as to how to go about researching American ancestors. I am trying to help a friend do her family tree.
What are the best sites for getting American certificates?
Is using Ancestry.com the best option along with the LDS site?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks
Diana
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