Top 80 High-End Genealogy & Family Tree Resources

"You live as long as you are remembered." - Russian proverb.

"Your ancestors count on you to remember them." - Anonymous.

"It is a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors." - Plutarch.

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." - George Bernard Shaw.

"Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you." - Mark Twain.

"There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his." - Helen Keller.

GENEALOGY, also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.

The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motivations, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.

A FAMILY TREE, or pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. The more detailed family trees used in medicine and social work are known as genograms.

GENETIC GENEALOGY is the use of DNA testing in combination with traditional genealogical methods to infer relationships between individuals and find ancestors. Genetic genealogy involves the use of genealogical DNA testing to determine the level and type of the genetic relationship between individuals. This application of genetics became popular with family historians in the 21st century, as tests became affordable.

DNA, Family Tree & Genealogical News, Reviews & Resources

• 5 countries helping you reconnect you with your roots - "As DNA ancestry testing kits like Ancestry and 23&Me have become more accessible and affordable, 'heritage tourism', or travel based on reconnecting people with their places of origin, has become more popular than ever."
• 23andMe - "Discover your FAMILY story together with 2 ANCESTRY Service kits for $99." Founded in 2006, 23andMe soon became the first company to begin offering autosomal DNA testing for ancestry, which all other major companies now use. Its saliva-based direct-to-consumer genetic testing business was named "Invention of the Year" by Time in 2008.
• 50 Free Genealogy Sites to Search Today - Family History Daily.
• Ahnentafel - an ahnentafel (German for "ancestor table") or ahnenreihe ("ancestor series") is a genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors in a fixed sequence of ascent.
• ANCESTOR - an ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
• Ancestry Tests Produced Shocking Results. Should I Tell My Family? - "The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on the burden that comes with obtaining genealogical information."
• Ancestry.Com Is Quietly Transforming Itself Into A Medical Research Juggernaut - Huffington Post.
• Best Ancestry DNA Tests - "Are you looking to see what percentage Jamaican you are? Do you want to find new branches of your family tree? We’ve done all the hard work for you and compared the best DNA test kits online."
• best DNA ancestry test - "AncestryDNA is the best option for most people."
• best DNA testing kit - "AncestryDNA does the best job presenting data in a clear, easy-to-understand way."
• BillionGraves - "The world's largest resource for searchable GPS cemetery data, and is growing bigger and better every day. You can help by collecting headstone images from local and other cemeteries, and then by transcribing the personal information found on the images."
• COMPARISON OF GENEALOGY SOFTWARE - Wikipedia.
• CONNECTED HISTORIES - Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace.
• Descent from antiquity - (DFA or DfA) is a well-researched, historically documented generation-by-generation genealogical descent tracing living persons back to people living in antiquity.
• DNA - Wikipedia.
• DNA reveals biggest-ever human family tree, dating back 100,000 years - "Researchers have used genetics to create the largest human family tree ever made, allowing individuals to find out who their distant ancestors were and where they lived, as well as exactly how they are related to everyone alive today."
• DNA Unwrapped - "Take your DNA Ancestry Test & Discover your Heritage."
• Do a DNA test to 'find out my roots'? That's complicated for a black woman like me - "I’ll never use a service like AncestryDNA or 23andMe. Here’s why."
• Do You Like Your Name? - The New York Times.
• FAMILY TREE - or pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. The more detailed family trees used in medicine and social work are known as genograms.
• FAMILY HISTORY - Wikipedia.
• FAMILY HISTORY DAILY - "Genealogy research help, news and stories."
• Family Tree DNA offers to trade privacy to catch criminals - "Allowing the FBI access to your genetic data is now a selling point."
• FAMILY TREE MAGAZINE - "The Leading Family History Magazine." The leading family history magazine for researching Genealogy. Helping to discover, preserve, and celebrate family history.
• FIND A GRAVE - "World’s largest gravesite collection." Over 210 million memorials created by the community since 1995. Website that allows the public to search and add to an online database of cemetery records. It is owned by Ancestry.com.
• Free Genealogy E-books, Templates & Chart Downloads - Family Tree Magazine.
• Genealogy Database Helps Solve 45-Year-Old Double Murder - TIME Magazine.
• GENEALOGICAL DNA TEST - is a DNA-based test which looks at specific locations of a person's genome in order to determine ancestral ethnicity and genealogical relationships. Results give information about ethnic groups the test subject may be descended from and about other individuals that they may be related to.
• Genealogical numbering systems - several genealogical numbering systems have been widely adopted for presenting family trees and pedigree charts in text format.
• GENEALOGY - also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history.
• GENEALOGY MAGAZINE.COM - books, articles & databases for tracing your family tree.
• Genealogy service's DNA test helps you find your roots - engadget.
• GENEALOGY SOFTWARE - computer software used to record, organize, and publish genealogical data.
• Genealogy tourism - sometimes called roots tourism, is a segment of the tourism market consisting of tourists who have ancestral connections to their holiday destination. These genealogy tourists travel to the land of their ancestors to reconnect with their past and "walk in the footsteps of their forefathers".
• GENETIC GENEALOGY - is the use of DNA testing in combination with traditional genealogy and traditional genealogical and historical records to infer relationships between individuals.
• Genogram - is a pictorial display of a person's family relationships and medical history. It goes beyond a traditional family tree by allowing the user to visualize hereditary patterns and psychological factors that punctuate relationships. It can be used to identify repetitive patterns of behavior and to recognize hereditary tendencies.
• Genographic Project - "The Genographic Project, launched on 13 April 2005 by the National Geographic Society and IBM, was a genetic anthropological study (sales discontinued on 31 May 2019) that aimed to map historical human migrations patterns by collecting and analyzing DNA samples. The final phase of the project was Geno 2.0 Next Generation. Upon retirement of the site, 1,006,542 participants in over 140 countries had joined the project."
• How a DNA Swab Could Help Plan Your Next Vacation - Travel + Leisure.
• How secure is DNA testing? - "What you might be giving away in an ancestry test."
• How to Leave a Legacy When You Don’t Have Children - "The question of what you leave behind can be especially fraught for people who do not have heirs."
• I Keep the Family Tree & I’m Flummoxed About Whom to Include - "If the shape of family trees is a matter of convention, so is your status as keeper of the family tree. Nothing stops other ancestry-minded people from keeping different trees that acknowledge different kinds of family relationships."
• Julia Roberts Learns She Isn't Actually a 'Roberts' After DNA Test: 'My Mind is Blown' - "Julia Roberts discovered a centuries-old marital affair involving her great-great-grandfather on PBS' Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr."
• KINSHIP - in anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of most humans in most societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated.
• List of family trees - Wikipedia.
• List of genealogy databases - Wikipedia.
• MAYBE DNA CAN’T ANSWER ALL OUR QUESTIONS ABOUT HEREDITY - Wired.
• Mayflower 400 years: How many people are related to the Mayflower pilgrims? - "There are a few estimates out there, all of them quite high. According to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, there are '35 million Mayflower descendants in the world'."
• NEWSPAPERS.com - since 2012. "The largest online newspaper archive consisting of 525 million+ pages of historical newspapers from 13,400+ newspapers from around the United States and beyond. Newspapers provide a unique view of the past and can help us understand and connect with the people, events and attitudes of an earlier time."
• ORIGIN OF GIVEN NAMES - a given name (also known as a first name, Christian name, or forename) is a part of a person's personal name. It identifies a specific person, and differentiates that person from other members of a group, such as a family or clan, with whom that person shares a common surname.
• Our Family Tree - "Collaborating to connect family with history." Full-featured online genealogy collaboration website intended both for people browsing, and a tool for researchers to maintain and collaborate on their research efforts.
• PEDIGREE CHART - is a diagram that shows the occurrence and appearance or phenotypes of a particular gene or organism and its ancestors from one generation to the next, most commonly humans, show dogs, and race horses.
• Proband - in medical genetics and other medical fields, a proband, proposito (male proband), or proposita (female proband) is a particular subject (person or animal) being studied or reported on. On pedigrees, the proband is noted with a square (male) or circle (female) shaded accordingly. Denoting the proband is important, so the relationship to other individuals can be seen and patterns established. The term "proband" is also used in genealogy, where it denotes the root node of an ahnentafel, also referred to as the progenitor.
• Progenitor - in genealogy, the progenitor (rarer: primogenitor; German: Stammvater or Ahnherr) is the - sometimes legendary - founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group. Genealogy (commonly known as family history) understands a progenitor to be the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants.
• RESEARCHERS USED THIS GENEALOGY SITE TO BUILD A 13 MILLION-PERSON FAMILY TREE - Wired.
• The Historians Versus the Genealogists - The New York Times.
• The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Genealogy - "The idea of doing genealogy research might make you cringe because you imagine yourself spending hours trapped in a library or a town hall as you dig through dusty books and tall shelves. You can now do much of the research that you like from home."
• Top 100 Genealogy Blogs and Websites in 2019 - Family History Blogs.
• What happens when you take a genealogy test - "More than 26 million people worldwide have taken at-home genealogy tests, according to MIT Technology Review."
• What Is Genealogy & How To Start? - "This guide on Genealogy will look at the hows, whats, and whys of genealogy, providing an in-depth look of how it works."
• What the world’s largest family tree tells us about marriage & death in the West - The Verge.
• When the Results of a DNA Test Change the Family Tree - "Tens of millions of Americans have taken DNA tests, and stories of them linking up with unknown family, often separated by closed adoptions, have been a feature of news reports for years. Some, like my friend, learn of 'misattributed parenting,' or what is known as an NPE, for Non-Paternity Event."
• Who do I think I am? What happened when I took a DNA test - The Telegraph.
• Why You Should Dig Up Your Family’s History - and How to Do It - "Learning your history is forced reckoning, asking you to consider whose stories you carry with you and which ones you want to carry forward."
• With a Simple DNA Test, Family Histories Are Rewritten - The New York Times.
• World's oldest family tree reconstructed from Stone Age tomb - "The oldest family tree in the world has been reconstructed through the analysis of ancient DNA taken from a Stone Age tomb in Britain, according to a new study published Wednesday. Researchers extracted DNA from the bones and teeth of 35 individuals buried at Hazleton North long cairn in the Cotswolds-Severn region, England. They found that 27 of them were close biological relatives and were from five continuous generations of a single extended family. The group lived around 3700-3600 BC - approximately 5,700 years ago. Researchers discovered that most of those buried in the tomb were descended from four women who had children with the same man."
• World’s oldest family tree revealed in 5,700-year-old Cotswolds tomb - "DNA analysis of bodies in Hazleton North long cairn finds five generations of an extended family."
• Your DNA is a valuable asset, so why give it to ancestry websites for free? - "DNA testing companies are starting to profit from selling our data on to big pharma. Perhaps they should be paying us."
• Your entire genome can now be sequenced for US$999 - and the results sent to your smartphone.

Top 15 High-End Online Family Tree & Genealogy Companies

• ANCESTRY.COM - since 1983. "World's largest online family history resource." As of November 2018, the company provides access to approximately 10 billion historical records, has 3 million paying subscribers and has sold 14 million DNA kits to customers.
• Archives - since 2009. "Discover your family history." Quickly and simply search more than 11.5 billion photos, newspapers, and vital records to get information about your ancestors.
• FAMILY TREE - since 1997. "Start your family tree for free." Connect with your family story on Ancestry and discover the what, where, and who of how it all leads to you.
• FAMILY TREE DNA - since 2000. "Say goodbye to brick walls." Unlock each part of your genetic ancestry with autosomal DNA, mtDNA, and Y-DNA testing to discover your full story.
• Family Tree Maker - since 1989. "The #1 Selling Family Tree Program." Easily build your family tree. Preserve your family legacy. Update your tree anywhere. For Mac and Windows.
• Find a Grave - since 1995. "World’s largest gravesite collection." Over 170 million memorials created by the community since 1995. Website that allows the public to search & add to an online database of cemetery records. It is owned by Ancestry.com, the world's largest for-profit genealogy company.
• Fold3 - since 1999. "Discover your family's military past." Historical military records. Fold3 provides convenient access to military records, including the stories, photos, and personal documents of the men and women who served.
• GENEALOGY.COM - since 1999. "Genealogy.com is a source for family history buffs to find genealogical research originally posted in GenForum and our most popular genealogy articles."
• GENEBASE - since 1998. "Build your Interactive Family Tree. It's Free!" It's free! Your online family tree is completely free. DNA testing is optional. Build your family tree by adding everything you know, invite your family to help out and add what they know. Your family tree will have a built-in genetic calculator which will calculate how to trace the ancestry of different lines in your family. Use your tree to share, store and organize your ancestry research.
• GENI - since 2006. "Family Tree & Family History." Create your family tree and invite relatives to share. Geni’s Pro subscription service allows users to find matching trees and merge those into the single world family tree, which currently contains over 100 million living users and their ancestors. Share photos, videos and more at Geni.com.
• GRAMPS - since 2001. "Research, organize and share your family tree with Gramps." Gramps is a free software project and community. We strive to produce a genealogy program that is both intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.
• MYHERITAGE.COM - since 2003. Commercial family-oriented social network service and genealogy website. It allows paying members to create their own family websites, share pictures and videos, organize family events, create family trees, and search for ancestors. Users of the platform can create family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 9 billion historical records, among other features. As of 2018, the service supports 42 languages and has around 92 million users worldwide. In January 2017 it was reported that MyHeritage has 35 million family trees on its website.
• MyTrees.com - since 1996. "A Complete Genealogy and Family History Resource Center." Search Over a Billion Records. One of the most advanced genealogical research sites in the world. Since 1996 we have successfully set new standards in the presentation of genealogical data on the World Wide Web. We were the first website to have an online family tree, the first to give away a genealogy program to use off line, the first to allow our patrons to download their family tree in gedcom format, the first to present the data in a family pedigree format, and the first to provide an automated Every Family Search over every name in your family tree.
• Rootsweb - since 1993. "Finding our roots together." The Internet's oldest and largest FREE genealogical community. An award winning genealogical resource with searchable databases. Free genealogy community that uses online forums, mailing lists, and other resources to help people research their family history.
• The Genographic Project - since 2005. "The Human Story. Join The Project To Learn About Your Story." Participants in the Genographic Project in over 140 Countries. Discover the complete story of your ancestors’ journey from 200,000 years ago to today with National Geographic’s Ancestry DNA kit, Geno 2.0. Since its launch in 2005, National Geographic’s Genographic Project has used advanced DNA analysis and worked with indigenous communities to help answer fundamental questions about where humans originated and how we came to populate the Earth. Now, cutting-edge technology is enabling us to shine a powerful new light on our collective past. By participating in the latest phase of this real-time scientific project, you can learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible. As of 2018, almost one-million participants in over 140 countries have joined the project.