In this guide, we'll explore the best websites for accessing family data records online. With the help of these resources you will be able to fill the missing pieces in your family tree.
We've grouped resources by country, but feel free to explore all of them because you never know how far your family stretches. Sometimes you will find your relatives in the most unexpected archives. After all — we are all related on Earth.
A few practical suggestions that will save you time before you dive into the archives:
Know what you're looking for. Before searching, write down the full name, approximate birth year, and the place of origin of the person you're researching. Even partial information helps narrow searches significantly.
Names change across borders and languages. Your ancestor's name in an official record may look very different from how it appears in family memory. German names were often anglicized for immigrants to the USA. Slavic names had different endings depending on gender and the language of the record. Jewish families frequently used both Hebrew and secular names. When searching, try variations of the spelling.
Old administrative boundaries don't match modern countries. A village in modern-day Poland might appear under a German name in 19th-century Prussian records, or under a Russian name in Tsarist-era documents. FamilySearch and Ancestry often have search tools that account for historical administrative regions, which can help you locate the right archive.
Digitization is ongoing. If a record doesn't exist online today, it may be available within a year or two. It's worth returning to archives periodically, especially for Eastern European and South American collections which are being digitized rapidly.
There are several excellent options for finding birth, marriage, and death records for families in the USA.
FamilySearch.com is an enormous effort by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They have managed to collect data from all over the world, and there is a high chance that your relatives are already in the database. It is completely free to use, with no subscription required.
For US Census records specifically, Ancestry and FamilySearch both hold large collections. The census was taken every 10 years and records the names, ages, and relationships of everyone in a household — an invaluable source for tracing family structure across decades.
United Kingdom ancestry is well documented and there are plenty of online resources to access British ancestry records.
Germany has a rich genealogical record system, though records are split across 16 federal states, each with its own archive.
For German emigrant families, the Hamburg emigration lists (1850–1934) are a remarkable resource. They recorded everyone who left through the port of Hamburg and are searchable online for free via the Hamburg State Archive.
Irish genealogical research presents unique challenges due to the destruction of many records in the 1922 Public Record Office fire. However, significant collections remain.
Poland's genealogical records are complex because the country was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria for most of the 19th century. Records were kept in different languages depending on the occupying power.
Italian records are kept at the municipal level, which means researching Italian ancestry often requires knowing the specific comune (municipality) your ancestors came from.
Some ex-Soviet countries have done a better job than others in releasing and documenting ancestry archives. Try your luck and see if you can find your relatives. Every service listed below has millions of ancestry records.
An incredible effort was made by Lithuania when they published high-resolution photo scans of all available church records. It does not have a search function, but the data is sorted by geographical location. If you want to know more about your Lithuanian ancestry, EAIS Archyvai is a great place to start collecting information.
Not everything has been digitized, and some records may only exist in physical form in local archives. Here are options when online searches come up short:
Contact the local civil registry office in the town where your ancestor lived. Many countries still hold physical records going back centuries at the local level. A short email in the local language (easily written with a translation tool) can sometimes unlock access to records that are not listed anywhere online.
Reach out to local genealogical societies. Most countries and regions have volunteer genealogical societies whose members are experts in local records. They may be able to help with searches, suggest archives you haven't considered, or connect you with other researchers working on the same family name.
Hire a local genealogist for regions where language and archive access present a barrier. A professional researcher with local knowledge can often find records in hours that would take an amateur researcher years to locate.
Look for living relatives in the region. Social networks and genealogy platforms sometimes connect people who share common ancestry. Finding a distant cousin who has already researched the same branch of the family can save enormous amounts of time.
We are lucky to live in the digital era as it is easier than ever to create a family tree using data collected from public archives. We hope you find the list of archives useful and that you will discover exactly what you are looking for.
Once you have gathered information from these archives, the next step is organizing it. FamilyBushes.com makes it easy to enter the data you find, attach documents and photos, add event locations on the map, and build a family tree that brings everything together in one place.
Create and share with all your relative. Export your family tree to keep the information safe and saved foreved!
