25 Free Genealogy Websites Worth Bookmarking
You can research a family tree back to the early 1800s — often further — without spending a dollar, because the best sources in genealogy are largely free: FamilySearch, the National Archives, Find a Grave, Chronicling America, and a bench of specialized sites most beginners never hear about. This list collects the 25 free genealogy websites that actually earn a bookmark, organized by what each one does best.
Everything here is genuinely free to search (a couple require a free account; none require a card number). Work through them alongside our step-by-step free tree guide, and keep the free relationship calculator on our homepage open in the next tab — every one of these sites will eventually hand you a relative you can't name.
Which record should I search? Tap what you know about your ancestor and get the free site that fits.
Tap a button above to get a starting point.
Map how you're related to them →The everyday essentials
Before the full tour, here's the short list at a glance — the sites that do the heaviest lifting, what's genuinely free at each, and the one catch worth knowing:
| Site | What's free | Strongest for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| FamilySearch | Everything — billions of records, images, world tree | All-purpose research; the free backbone | Free account needed for most images; some restricted images are library-only |
| Find a Grave | All memorials and headstone photos | Death dates and burial places, fast | Volunteer-entered data — verify dates against records |
| National Archives (archives.gov) | Census schedules, military, naturalization, passenger lists | Official US federal records | Some files must be ordered on paper for a fee |
| Chronicling America | Millions of newspaper pages, 1750s–1960s | Obituaries and family announcements | Coverage thins in recent decades; biggest papers often paywalled elsewhere |
| Ancestry / MyHeritage free tiers | Limited free indexes, trials, and library editions | Exclusive collections via a library's access | Full access is paid — watch trial auto-renewals |
| State archives & vital indexes | Varies — many free birth/death index searches | Pre-1900 vital records, state by state | Coverage differs wildly from state to state |
1. FamilySearch.org — the free site: billions of indexed records, a collaborative world tree, and digitized films you can browse. If you bookmark one site, it's this one. (Full walkthrough: our FamilySearch guide.)
2. National Archives (archives.gov) — the US government's own records: census schedules, military files, naturalizations, passenger lists. The dedicated 1950census.archives.gov site is a model of free access.
3. Find a Grave — millions of memorials with headstone photos, dates, and volunteer-linked family plots. Often the fastest free way to get a death date.
4. BillionGraves — Find a Grave's GPS-tagged sibling; each photo is pinned to exact cemetery coordinates. Coverage differs, so check both.
5. USGenWeb — a 1990s-style volunteer network with a page for every US county: transcribed records, cemetery lists, lookups by locals. Old-fashioned and irreplaceable.
6. Cyndi's List — the master directory of genealogy links, human-curated for decades. When you wonder "is there a site for Norwegian farm records?", Cyndi answers.
Newspapers and print
7. Chronicling America (Library of Congress) — millions of digitized newspaper pages, 1750s–1960s, free full-text search. Obituaries, marriage announcements, scandal.
8. Internet Archive (archive.org) — county histories, city directories, yearbooks, and out-of-print genealogies, all free. The city directories alone justify the bookmark.
9. Google Books — full-view scans of pre-1929 local histories and published genealogies. Search a full name in quotes; you'll be surprised.
10. HathiTrust — the academic cousin: massive digitized library holdings, strong on state historical society publications.
Graves, vitals, and the paper trail
11. SSDI via free portals — the Social Security Death Index (deaths mostly 1962–2014) is searchable free on FamilySearch: birth and death dates plus last residence.
12. Reclaim the Records — an activist nonprofit that sues governments to release record indexes, then posts them free: New York vital indexes and more. Check what they've liberated for your state.
13. State archives and vital records indexes — many states (Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Washington, and others) post free birth/death index searches or even certificate images. Search "[state] archives genealogy."
Immigration and emigration
14. Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation (heritage.statueofliberty.org) — free searchable passenger arrivals for the Port of New York, 1892–1924, ship manifests included.
15. Castle Garden database — arrivals before Ellis Island opened, back to 1820. When the standalone site misbehaves, the same manifests are indexed free on FamilySearch.
Military
16. NPS Soldiers and Sailors Database — the National Park Service's free index of over six million Civil War servicemen, Union and Confederate, by name and regiment.
17. VA National Gravesite Locator — free search of veterans buried in national and many state cemeteries, with dates and service branch.
18. Fold3's free collections — Fold3 is a paid military site, but it maintains a rotating set of permanently free collections and frequent free-access windows; also free through many libraries.
Land, law, and lineage
19. BLM General Land Office (glorecords.blm.gov) — free images of federal land patents. Homesteaders and public-land buyers appear by name, with legal land descriptions.
20. DAR Genealogical Research System (services.dar.org) — the Daughters of the American Revolution's free database of proven patriots and the documented lineages descending from them.
21. Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (Newberry Library) — interactive maps of every US county boundary change ever. Explains why great-grandpa "moved" three counties without leaving his farm.
International heavy hitters
22. FreeBMD / FreeCEN / FreeREG — the UK volunteer trinity: free indexes of England & Wales civil registration (from 1837), censuses, and parish registers. Pair with our UK census guide.
23. National Archives of Ireland genealogy site — the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses, complete with images, entirely free.
24. Library and Archives Canada — every released Canadian census (1825–1931) plus immigration and military records, free with images. (See our Canadian census guide.)
25. JewishGen — the hub for Jewish family history worldwide: town databases, Holocaust records, burial registries, free with registration.
Honorable mentions
Steve Morse's One-Step tools (stevemorse.org) would be #26 and arguably belong in the top five — free utilities that search other sites better than those sites search themselves. WikiTree (free collaborative tree), Access Genealogy (Native American sources), and the David Rumsey Map Collection round out a serious bookmark folder.
How to actually use 25 bookmarks
Don't tour all 25 — deploy them in order:
- FamilySearch + the census builds the skeleton (names, dates, places, households).
- Find a Grave + newspapers + SSDI close out each person's dates.
- Immigration, military, and land sites add depth where the census hints (a "Na" in the citizenship column, a veteran mark, a homestead state).
- County-level sites (USGenWeb, state archives) crack the stubborn cases.
- International sites take over when the trail crosses the ocean.
And as the tree widens, name the relationships precisely as you go — "Grandma's cousin Mabel" becomes a documented first cousin twice removed with one click on the free CousinChart relationship calculator. Precise labels now prevent merged-cousin chaos later.
A sample session: one ancestor through six free sites
Here's what the bookmarks look like in motion. Say all you know is that your great-great-grandfather, Albert Voss, farmed somewhere in Nebraska and died "sometime in the thirties."
- FamilySearch, census first. A search for Albert Voss in Nebraska finds him in the 1900 census in Custer County: born May 1858 in Germany, immigrated 1883, wife Wilhelmina, six children named. One free search, and the skeleton exists.
- BLM General Land Office. He was a Nebraska farmer in the homestead era, so glorecords.blm.gov gets thirty seconds — and there he is, a 160-acre homestead patent from 1891 with the exact legal description of the land.
- Find a Grave. Searching Voss in Custer County cemeteries turns up his headstone photo: 1858–1936. The "thirties" just became a death year, and the memorial links to Wilhelmina and two of the children buried beside him.
- Chronicling America. With 1936 in hand, a search of Nebraska papers finds the obituary — which names his birthplace as a specific village in Schleswig-Holstein, his surviving children with their married names, and the fact that a brother "remained in the old country."
- Ellis Island / Castle Garden. An 1883 arrival predates Ellis Island, so the Castle Garden-era manifests (indexed free on FamilySearch) get the search. There's the ship, and traveling beside Albert, that brother the obituary mentioned.
- USGenWeb. The Custer County volunteer page has a transcribed 1919 county-history sketch of the Voss farm — the kind of source no national index would ever surface.
Forty-five minutes, zero dollars, and one line of the tree now runs from a Nebraska grave back to a named German village. The order matters less than the chaining: each site's find becomes the next site's search term.
Your library card is site #27 (and it's a monster)
One free credential multiplies this whole list: a public library card. Most library systems quietly subscribe to genealogy databases you'd otherwise pay for, and some work from your couch:
- HeritageQuest Online — offered by thousands of libraries with home access: census images, Revolutionary War pension files, and thousands of digitized county histories, all through your library's website.
- Ancestry Library Edition — nearly everything Ancestry has, free on in-branch computers (some systems still offer temporary home access).
- Newspaper databases — many state libraries provide free access to paywalled newspaper archives for residents, covering exactly the years Chronicling America thins out.
- Interlibrary loan — that out-of-print 1897 county history Google Books only shows in snippets? A librarian can usually borrow you a physical copy for nothing.
Check your library's "online resources" or "databases" page before assuming a record is behind a paywall. Between a library card and the 25 sites above, the genuinely inaccessible-for-free layer of American genealogy is thinner than the subscription ads suggest.
Free doesn't mean forever: save what you find
One habit separates researchers who keep their discoveries from those who lose them: download the image, don't just bookmark the page. Free sites are wonderful and mortal. Volunteer USGenWeb pages vanish when their maintainer retires, databases get reorganized and break every old link, and even the big institutional sites redesign their URLs every few years. That census page you found tonight should live on your own hard drive by tonight.
The five-second routine, every time you find something:
- Save the record image (right-click, save, or the site's download button) with a filename you'll understand in ten years — "1900-census-voss-albert-custer-co-NE.jpg" beats "image(47).jpg."
- Note where it came from — site, collection name, and the locator (county, enumeration district, page). A record you can't re-find is a record you can't prove.
- Write down what it told you while it's fresh — especially the incidental details (a neighbor's familiar surname, an odd middle name) that won't seem important until three months from now, when they suddenly are.
FAQ
What is the best free genealogy website overall?
FamilySearch.org, without much argument: billions of free indexed records, free images, a collaborative world tree, and a research wiki. Every other site on this list supplements it; none replaces it.
Can I really build a family tree without paying anything?
Yes — most American families can be documented back to the mid-1800s using only free sources: censuses, Find a Grave, free newspapers, state vital indexes, and FamilySearch's records. Paid sites add convenience and some exclusive collections, not necessity. Our free family tree guide shows the full method.
Are free genealogy sites safe to use?
The ones on this list, yes — they're run by governments, libraries, nonprofits, and long-established volunteer projects. None asks for payment details. Standard advice applies anywhere: use a unique password, and share living people's details cautiously on any collaborative tree.
What free sites have UK and Irish records?
FreeBMD, FreeCEN, and FreeREG index England & Wales civil registration, censuses, and parish registers free; FamilySearch duplicates much of it. Scotland's official ScotlandsPeople site offers free index searching (images cost credits), and Ireland's 1901 and 1911 censuses are completely free at the National Archives of Ireland.
What's the biggest gap in free genealogy coverage?
Recent records (privacy laws), some newspaper archives (the biggest are paywalled), and certain record images licensed only to paid sites or FamilySearch's in-library viewing. That last one has a free fix: FamilySearch affiliate libraries unlock restricted images and often provide free Ancestry Library Edition too — see how to use Ancestry for free.
Which of these sites require an account?
Only a few, and all free: FamilySearch requires a free account to view most images, JewishGen asks for free registration, and Find a Grave needs one only if you want to add or edit memorials. Everything else on the list — the National Archives, Chronicling America, BLM land records, USGenWeb, the Irish censuses — is search-and-view with no sign-up at all.
Do these sites work for non-US research?
Increasingly, yes. FamilySearch has deep collections for Latin America, Europe, and Asia; JewishGen covers Eastern Europe; national archives in Canada, Ireland, and the UK offer free material. The FamilySearch Research Wiki page for each country lists what exists.
Bookmark now, thank yourself in a decade
Genealogy rewards the researcher with the best free toolkit, not the biggest budget. These 25 sites cover births to burials on both sides of the Atlantic, and they'll carry most trees back four, five, six generations for exactly nothing. Start with FamilySearch and the census tonight — and when the new branches start sprouting cousins of every degree, the free CousinChart relationship calculator will keep every last one of them labeled correctly.
