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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.
Marriage licenses are great sources of family history information. They usually show ages, parents, witnesses and in some cases where the bride, groom, and parents were born and their occupations. Death certificates are also useful. They show death dates, birth dates, parents, who reported the death, but also often contain other key information like place of residence and much more in depth family history information like causes of death
Each family history life archive takes the place of the traditional family Group Sheet and is a very simple way to keep track of family members and family groups. Take the information that you receive on each ancestor or family member and and make a Family Group and family history entry on each person in your family. Start with yourself, then your parents and their children, your grandparents and their children. As you work back further in time you may contact relatives or other researchers to gather more family history content . Ask them to contribute to your family history research by sending them a family tree or family history archive invite and add any family material they have through arcalife collaborative tools
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
