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Check our family history surname directory for hundreds of thousands of common and some rare surnames. If you have a rarer surname in your ancestor line this can be a way of making rapid progress. With a less common surname you can make rapid progress in weeks, days or even hours. You can contact other family historians with the same surname through our site and collaborate on researching your family history
There are thousands of LDS churches and family history centers around the world. Many have resources on site or on your behalf can send requests to Salt lake city to have microfilms of family history data sent in for you to view in the center or church.
In your search for the family history, ‘cast your net wide’. Local newspaper offices or libraries can give you or get you copies of obituary notices which can give you multiple family history search leads. Obituary notices contain lots of useful information. If you are in any doubt, take a look at the Obits section of your local paper. In the older obituaries, longer write-ups are given on family members when they died telling about not only the person but about their life and in some cases about when their family line settled in a certain area of the country. Or you can Search the Obituary Collections at arcalife.com along side of more than a billion other family history records.
In both the US and the UK there are volunteer based initiatives to digitize and index Birth, marriage and death records for family history purposes. In the US you can refine your family history search by county, state and names. In the UK you can access the index of births, marriages, and deaths from England and Wales from 1837 to 1983. The free BMD database includes over 68 million family history records.
