Ask HN: What are good genealogy/family history/immigration search engines?

[dmarlow]

I recently came across some family names that I was previously unaware of. Some family members had been separated, killed, or went missing during WW2. Are there good places to search for records, especially those from Germany, Ukraine and Russia? I'd be especially grateful for some sort of adoption records from Germany from the mid/late 1940's. Also wonderful would be birth/death records.

[LinuxBender]

I can't speak to what websites are good for this. AFAIK most of the websites are scams, to Geonode's point.

One great source for genealogy however is the Church of the Latter Day Saints. They have well funded teams that research genealogy non stop. [1] I would just visit a local church and see if they can assist.

[1] - https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Latter-day_Saint_Online...

[ljoshua]

On the FamilySearch wiki linked to in the parent, there are also many country-specific guides that link to resources both inside and outside of FamilySearch. Those that may be of interest to you given the countries you mentioned:

- Germany: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Germany_Genealogy

- Ukraine: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Ukraine_Genealogy

- Russia: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Russia_Genealogy

Also see the main wiki page, which has a Locality finder and may have other links depending on how far back you want to go (e.g., German Empire): https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Main_Page

And of course, search the entire FamilySearch database too, which aggregates many, many sources: https://www.familysearch.org/search/

[imustbeevil]

To anyone else (like me) wondering why the Mormons maintain a genealogy database:

> Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For Latter-day Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit.

https://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/genealogy.html

[macksd]

Yeah FamilySearch also has a lot of links and relationships with other organizations, so it's a good starting point to tie a lot of other resources together. Once you get enough stuff put together to get hints of recently digitized records that match your tree, the research almost does itself, and you're just acting as the human in the loop making sure the connections it makes are well-founded.

[UIUC_06]

The guy who mentioned LDS was spot on. I wandered into one of their "family research centers" once and they spent an hour with me, all free.

Unfortunately, as I've discovered myself, it is NOT true that everything is digitized. If it even is, it might just be the images (not OCR'ed).

I found my own family in the 1950 US census (just released), and I did it by knowing what street they lived on, and searching about 40 handwritten records from their "Enumeration District" until I found that street. And that's relatively recent, and it's in English.

But maybe you'll be lucky. Good luck.

[clasicallyabbyy]

Would be interesting to know if they’ve gotten into OCR solutions at all on their collection of documents. Worked for a company back in the day that sourced historical, public domain books from JSTOR, Google Books, etc. We used Abbyy to run OCR across all these old texts to provide highlighting in-app, text search, etc.

Took some tuning but we had good quality output across a variety of (mostly European) languages.

[matheweis]

I spent a significant part of the covid period absolutely hooked on genealogy research.

As others have mentioned, (1) http://familysearch.com is excellent, incredibly good for being free, and (2) http://ancestry.com is also extremely useful. Yes the latter is paid and expensive, unfortunately. There is a significant degree of overlap between the two, but both tend to have some resources indexed (or indexed slightly differently) that the other does not. It will be difficult to do a serious search without using both to complement each other.

German records are fairly good from about the early 1800’s through the early 1900’s right up to the world wars. The wars mucked with things and for obvious reasons you will find families migrating to escape poverty, war, death, etc.

Some random tips:

* Remember that borders are not static. Name of places and even countries change over time and this was especially true of Germany during this time period. An invaluable tool to help disambiguate this is the Meyer’s Gazetter http://meyersgaz.org/

* Trace to at least 3 generations and 3rd cousins of your known connections, and look at the other trees connected to those individuals on ancestry.com. While user created trees are sometimes sloppy and should be taken with several grains of salt, it is often the case that someone else in the wider family already knows or has researched something, and it can be a good place to start pulling at threads before starting from scratch.

* Spelling of names can change through the years and across migrations. Learn to think phonetically and assume transcription errors happen frequently, both of the records and in the creation of the records themselves.

* Birthdates are just as bad as name transcriptions, finding matching records at +/- 2 years is relatively common, I usually search a person at +/- 5 years when starting out. This is especially true with adoptions, unfortunately.

* Because of the previous, family group matches (ages/gender) are at least as important as exact name matches. Ex a family with a vaguely similar family name, but dad, mom, and 7 children of the right age/gender, might be a match.

* For most of the older records there may be no census or similar. In this case it can be relatively same to assume groups of children clustered in the same place, with the same parent names, are probably in the same family. (Especially true when the parents marriage and all the baptisms are at the same church)

[Jedd]

Another related hint to the vagaries of time in point 4 above -- years changed their start-date at various times, over the space of about 200 years, within Europe.

For example, if you were in England in February 1750, two months later it would be April 1751. This has lots of wonderfully weird knock-on effects while tracing your ancestors' history in that region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Day#Acceptance_of...

[garrickvanburen]

As a more general tip - not specific to German records - I highly recommend using FamilySearch and Ancestry to identify sources, then looking for and confirming those sources at Archive.org.

[jjguy]

Ancestry.com is a very well designed product with lots of data and a powerful network effect. I designed a search products for incident response data - also high volume, noisy but highly relational data set - ancestry’s design is very thoughtful.

The monthly subscription carries no commitment and you don’t lose data when not subscribed. So don’t think of it as “$xx per month commitment is so expensive!” But instead as “I’d happily pay $20 this month to support the research I want to do. Next month, we’ll see.” I’ve subscribed / stopped / resubscribed several times over the years as the time I have ebbs and flows.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

That being said it's very US-centric - if you want to get materials from a specific region, turn to region-specific resources. For example when researching Poland, you would use local resources, maybe FamilySearch for source material, and MyHeritage for other people's trees. Ancestry is simply not very common and has even less resources than FamilySearch does.

[vehemenz]

In addition to familysearch.org, I'd recommend getting a DNA test from 23andMe or Ancestry. The relatives matching feature could give you additional leads.

DNA + genealogy is the only way to be certain of things.

[baking]

If you are stuck, don't know much beyond a few generations and can't find the people you are looking for, DNA might be a big help. But DNA could open a can of worms, so be careful.

[mikewarot]

Newspapers.com is an interesting resource for stories about your family members here in the US, and some of the rest of the world. I learned that my Grandparents were the first couple married in a newly sanctified church, for example.

It's also fun to learn the history of the area in which you live. I've found it interesting to see the fairly large amount of history from the people who lived in this house in its 96 year history.

[fintler]

I've used https://www.wikitree.com quite a bit. I like it.

[Geonode]

Be aware that many of these sell your data.

[dragonsky67]

Just a reminder that much of this information, especially on the commercial databases the information is collated by well meaning people, but levels of accuracy differ vastly. Many people seem to find a name that they are looking for and with little further research/verification link it in with their family.

As with any research, if you want to verify the information, you have to go back to the original source, rather than rely on other peoples research ..

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

Arolsen archives are the primary place to look when you are looking for traces of slave laborers in germany or prisoners of concentration camps. When germany was defeated, a large chunk of surviving records was centralized there:

https://arolsen-archives.org/en/

[mikewarot]

We (all the commenters here) are obviously related, if you could go back into the lost history far enough. I wonder how close some of us are. It's that 6 degrees thing that always sits in the back of my mind.

[mbirth]

There's 2 different philosophies with these websites:

* One world tree where each person only appears once and all users contribute to collect as much details (usually with supporting documents) as possible for each person in the tree. Some genealogists hate these as they either don't want to share their (often costly) research with everyone for free or they had bad experiences with some users changing seemingly correct details to something else without providing proof.

* Several user-specific trees where each user has his own tree and can share it with selected other users or not. This also means that you might miss some details someone else found out about your tree's people. Those websites usually want a member fee for you to be able to see other user's trees and merge details from them.

These are the sites I know of:

* MyHeritage (user-specific trees) - very well known in Europe due to their excessive TV marketing, basically the gateway drug to genealogy here. But also lots of users that only tried it out once and thus have a very small tree only going back 1 or 2 generations. MyHeritage also matches your data with historic records and trees from other websites but wants to see money for you to manage those matches or copy details from other users' trees.

* Ancestry (user-specific trees) - never tried that one but I've heard they have one of the largest collection of scanned (by them) and indexed historic records and are a big preference amongst genealogists.

* FamilyTree (user-specific trees) - never tried that one

* FamilySearch (one-world tree) - see the other comments - it's a great resource and they even have an API (e.g. Synium's MacFamilyTree/MobileFamilyTree can sync data with FamilySearch). And it's free.

* WikiTree (one-world tree) - this free site "only" lets you build your tree but doesn't provide any own historic records. However, since users are encouraged to upload their records/proof and link those to their ancestors, you often find something. WikiTree also regularly has "competitions" where users are supposed to fill in details and climb to the top of the roster. Compared to all other sites the "Wiki" in "WikiTree" means that - apart from basic details like name and DOB/DOD - there's only a huge text field where you're supposed to add details in text form - like on a wiki page. If you use FamilySearch AND WikiTree, You can link your WikiTree data to FamilySearch and vice versa so it's clear those are the same person. The records also are publicly visible and appear on Google. Due to this I've been contacted by a few relatives I never knew about.

So for your research - apart from searching FamilySearch or visiting one of their research centres - I'd also suggest making free accounts at e.g. MyHeritage and/or Ancestry and add all the things you know, then wait whether a match pops up. If you're unsure about a date, make sure to set it to "Estimated" or "About" so the matching engine doesn't try to find an exact match.

[2rsf]

For Jewish relatives you can try Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center [1]) archives and witness pages.

[1] https://www.yadvashem.org/

[Komodai]

I'd just look at government archives.