How to trace your ancestry, starting with the papers at home

Most families can trace their ancestry three or four generations back from what is already in the house and in the memory of the oldest relatives. The order matters. Each step gives the next one the names and places it needs, so a search that begins with a surname alone often stalls, and one that begins with a grandfather's naturalization certificate rarely does.

This guide sets out that order for families of every background, with notes for Jewish families where their records differ.

How to trace your ancestry, step by step

1. Write down what you know about your parents and grandparents, with every spelling of each name, and mark what you are unsure of.
2. Gather the papers the family holds, and read each one for what it says and where it points.
3. Ask the oldest relatives what they remember, and record the conversations.
4. Find the family in the census, starting in 1950 and working back ten years at a time.
5. Find the arrival on a passenger list, and the naturalization file that followed.
6. Add birth, marriage and death records, gravestones, obituaries and military papers.
7. Find the town the family came from, in every spelling, and the archive that holds its records.
8. Check each record against the original before it goes into the tree, and note where it came from.

Start with yourself and work backward

Genealogy works from the known to the unknown. Write down what you know about your parents and grandparents: their full names, including any names used before they came to America and their Hebrew or Yiddish names, and the dates and places of birth, marriage, death and burial. Put a question mark beside anything you are unsure of. Use a family tree template with room for every spelling, so that names that changed from one record to the next are kept.

Records of living people are mostly closed, so a search under your own name finds little. Begin with the most recent generation that has died, usually the grandparents, and work back from them.

The papers at home

Before searching anywhere, go through what the family holds. Most homes have more than anyone remembers, such as a certificate in a drawer or a photograph with a studio's name and town stamped on the back. Read each paper twice, for what it says and for where it points.

In Jewish homes the papers often include a ketubah, letters in Yiddish and seforim with a grandfather's name written inside the cover.

A gravestone in a Jewish cemetery is often the most useful of these. It gives the Hebrew name with the father's name, as in Yaakov ben Avraham or Sara bas Moshe, so a photograph of one stone reaches a generation further back than the person buried there.

Keep every paper together while you work, and read what to do with old family photos and papers before anything is sorted out or thrown away. Letters in Yiddish or Hebrew are often the papers that name the town; old Yiddish and Hebrew letters explains how to have them read.

Ask the oldest relatives first

The oldest relatives remember people who left no papers, and the name of the town as the family said it. Ask them first, and record the conversations. Plain questions work best:

• What were your parents' and grandparents' full names, and what did people call them?
• Where were they born, and what was the town called then?
• When did they come to this country, from which port, and who in the family came first?
• Where are they buried, and which society or shul owned the plot?
• Who else in the family has papers or photographs?

Family stories are usually right in outline and wrong in some details, so treat each one as a lead to check. Questions to ask your grandparents gives a longer list for a second conversation, and it is worth learning how to record a parent's stories so that the recordings are kept safe.

The American records any family can search

With names and an approximate date of arrival, five kinds of American record carry the search back to the immigrant generation, and all of them can be searched free. The guides in finding family records take each one further. Have these ready before you begin.

The census, from 1850 to 1950

The federal census has been taken every ten years since 1790. From 1850 it names every free person in a household, and each census after that asked something new. Census pages are opened to the public 72 years after they are taken, so 1950 is the latest available. The National Archives released it on April 1, 2022, and it can be searched free on the National Archives' 1950 census site. Most of the 1890 census was lost after a fire at the Commerce Department in January 1921.

From the National Archives and the US Census Bureau, checked October 2026. Some states took censuses of their own in the years between; New York's of 1905, 1915 and 1925 are often missed.

Search for the whole household, and expect the spelling to change from one census to the next, since the enumerator wrote what he heard.

Passenger lists, and how to find immigration records for free

Ships' passenger lists record arrivals at American ports, and the National Archives holds them from about 1820 to 1982, with gaps. For New York, where most immigrants landed, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation offers a free search of arrivals from 1820 to 1957, and FamilySearch holds the lists of other ports. Later lists give the last place of residence and the relative the passenger was joining in America, and from 1907 they also name the nearest relative left behind, often with an address in the town.

Lists from 1907 on run across two pages, and the second page holds the relatives' names, so always look for it when you read a passenger list. The census from 1900 to 1930 gives a year of arrival that narrows the search of the Ellis Island records.

Naturalization papers

Naturalization usually took two steps: a declaration of intention, called first papers, and a petition, called second papers, filed a few years later. Before September 27, 1906, any court could naturalize, and the papers often say little. After that date the forms were standard, and they usually give the date and town of birth and the ship and date of arrival. To find a naturalization file:

1. Take the court and the date from the certificate in the family's papers, or the year of naturalization from the 1920 census.
2. For a federal court, ask the National Archives facility that serves the state where the court sat. Files of state and county courts are usually in state archives or the county's own records.
3. For a certificate issued from September 27, 1906, to March 31, 1956, ask US Citizenship and Immigration Services, whose genealogy program holds duplicates of the court papers and supplies copies for a fee.

Birth, marriage and death records

Vital records are kept by state and local offices, and the National Archives does not hold them. Many states began registering births and deaths only in the early twentieth century. A grandparent's death certificate is often the most useful: it usually names the person's parents, as the informant knew them, and the place of burial.

New York City's Municipal Archives has put its historical vital records online free, with births from 1866 to 1909, deaths from 1862 to 1948 and marriages from 1866 to 1949. Its search needs the exact spelling and the year, so try each spelling of the name in the old New York City vital records.

Graves, obituaries and military service

Jewish cemeteries in America were often divided into plots owned by burial societies and landsmanshaftn, the societies of people from one town, and the name on the gate of a plot is often the name of the town. JewishGen's burial registry lists millions of burials from about 9,500 cemeteries and cemetery sections, which is often the quickest way to find where a relative is buried. An old obituary names the relatives alive at the time, whose descendants may still hold photographs.

For a father or grandfather who served, start with the discharge papers at home. A 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center destroyed about 80 percent of the Army files for soldiers discharged between November 1912 and January 1960, and about 75 percent of the Air Force files for 1947 to 1964 for surnames after Hubbard. Other records often have to fill the gap in a father's or grandfather's military records.

Can you trace your family tree for free?

Yes, a long way. Most of the American records above, and many from abroad, can be searched without paying on the sites below. Many public libraries also offer free use of subscription sites.

Ancestry and MyHeritage charge a subscription, and whether Ancestry is worth it depends on how much of the family's record is American.

Find the town, then the records abroad

Every step before the arrival depends on one fact, the town. A country is not enough, because records abroad are kept by town or parish, and a family remembered as coming from Russia may have come from a place now in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus or Ukraine. Naturalization papers after 1906, passenger lists after 1907, a gravestone, a landsmanshaft plot and the postmark on a letter can each give it. Write down every spelling, since a town's name in Yiddish, Polish, German and Russian may all differ. Finding the town your family came from is the turning point of most searches.

With the town known, the archival research begins. A town's records are usually held in the country where it lies today:

• Poland. The Polish State Archives hold the older registers of births, marriages and deaths, many of them published online as scans, and JRI-Poland indexes the Jewish ones. Births from the last hundred years, and marriages and deaths from the last eighty, stay with the local civil registry office, so Polish family records of the twentieth century are often in two places.
• Germany. Civil registration began in Prussia in October 1874 and across the German Empire in January 1876, and some western regions kept civil registers from the French period. German genealogy records of this kind are kept by the local registry office or a regional archive.
• Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. The metrical books and revision lists, the records of the Russian Empire, are held in national and regional archives, many reachable only by written request.
• Galicia. The old Austrian province is now divided between Poland and Ukraine, and Gesher Galicia indexes and inventories the records of Galitzianer families.
• Britain. Births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales have been registered since July 1837, and FreeBMD indexes them. The National Archives at Kew publishes a guide to each kind of record.

For relatives who stayed in Europe through the war years, the Arolsen Archives and Yad Vashem hold lists and files that can be searched free, and help in finding out what happened to a relative. Many archives abroad answer only written requests, in their own language, and reply on their own schedules, so it helps to know how to write to a European archive before the first letter goes out.

For Jewish families

Jewish records add two things to check. The first is the name. Most Jews had a Hebrew name with the father's name, such as Yaakov ben Avraham, and an everyday name in Yiddish that often became an English one in America, and a record may use either.

The second is the surname. Many Jewish families in Eastern Europe took fixed surnames only in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when the governments required it, so a trail followed by surname usually ends around then, and the Hebrew names have to carry it further. Jewish last names explains where the surnames came from and when, and JewishGen and JRI-Poland are the places to start researching Jewish ancestors once the town is known.

Check each record before it goes in the tree

An index entry is someone else's reading of a record, and it can be wrong. Before a record goes into the tree, open the image of the original and read every column. Then test it against two facts you already know, such as the parents' names and the town. In the example on this site, an index gave a birth under the name Tarko where the original register reads Marko, and how to check that a record really belongs to your family tells how it was found.

How to get better at genealogy

Most of the skill is careful reading. Read the whole record, including the margins and the second page, and learn the handwriting of the period; the old German script called Kurrent and the Cyrillic of Russian registers each take time. Keep a list of what you searched and did not find, and cite every source.

The National Genealogical Society publishes courses, from a foundation course for beginners to advanced study, and the Board for Certification of Genealogists sets out the Genealogical Proof Standard that professionals follow. Local genealogical societies, Jewish ones among them, hold meetings for beginners.

Family History Month: a plan for a first weekend

The US Senate first named October Family History Month in 2001. Two free days are enough to take most families back to the generation that arrived. Families who keep Shabbos can use a Sunday and two evenings.

1. First morning: write down the generations you know, and gather the papers into one box with a list.
2. First afternoon: call the oldest relative you can reach and record the call.
3. Second morning: find your parents or grandparents in the 1950 census, then follow the household back through the censuses before it.
4. Second afternoon: look for the arrival on a passenger list under every spelling, note any naturalization court and date, and write down the town and what you still do not know.

Where tracing it yourself stops

Families who follow these steps usually reach the immigrant generation within weeks, and often the town. The records before that point are in Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian or Yiddish, written in old hands, and many have never been indexed, so they cannot be searched by name.

Some are online as scans that have to be read page by page. Others are held by archives that answer only written requests and reply in months, with fees for searches and copies, and some were lost long ago. A family with time and a reader of the languages can do much of this, and doing your family history yourself or commissioning it helps decide.

What a researched book adds

Some of these records can be searched from home. Others are held by archives that answer only written requests, in Polish, German, Russian or Yiddish, and some files have never been indexed at all. A Zichronos commission includes that work and its archive, copy and translation fees: the letters to the archives, the reading and translation of the originals, interviews with relatives, and the history of the family's town in its time. It ends in a finished book.

How the example was researched follows that work from the family's papers to the archives, and the examples page shows what the finished book holds. What a family history book costs compares the options, and How we work sets out the steps of a commission.

Sources: the US National Archives on census records, the 1890 census, the 1940 census, passenger arrivals, naturalization and the 1973 fire; the US Census Bureau's census questionnaires; the USCIS Genealogy Program; the New York City Municipal Archives; JewishGen on names at Ellis Island; Senate Resolution 160 of 2001; and the sites in the table above. Checked October 2026.