I spend my days trying to think of ways to make searching for names dates and places easier for just about anybody who wants to do Family History Work. I have found that what is easy for a 14 year old and what is easy for a 65 year old are not always the same.

For my own family history my biggest problem is deciding where to start. If I start on my Great Grandpa Mangum I can actually find a lot of good information. I found him in more than one Census in a marriage record and I even found a picture of his grave stone online. That was very cool.

The good news is that there is a lot of information about our relatives online. We can take advantage of free sites and paid services to compliment our work. For example in the Census information for GG Mangum it told me he lived in Iowa and Wyoming and this came from a paid site. My GG Mangum died in New Mexico and the cemetery site where his grave stone picture was hosted was free. Online is not just faster, a lot of times it can be a lot less expensive. If you can search and find someone without having to travel to where the records are stored – wow – save on travel expense and a lot of time.

There are always draw backs to relying on only one solution though. Which means there may be times when online is not the only answer you have to use to find what you are looking for. It can save a lot of time and help you know what not to look for next but there are times when the online information can be incomplete.

I found enough about GG Mangum that I started asking intelligent questions of my parents and older relatives. I found great stories and the reasons he traveled from place to place. These were then clues to help me look in additional places.

I have not found the official Death Certificate yet. After going to FamilySearch.org and searching the online catalog I have found the death certificate may be available at an LDS Family History Center if I were to spend about $6 to order a film and look through it at the center. I could also write an e-mail to New Mexico state archivist and ask where the death Certificates for Grant County in 1919 are currently available. Of course I easily found the e-mail addresses and information for the New Mexico State Archives online http://www.nmcpr.state.nm.us/contacts/contacts.asp.

I wish you luck in your search for your ancestors.

Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is an invaluable tool for the genealogy aficionados. The SSDI is an extremely important database that contains all the critical data about mainly deceased Americans and indexes more than 79 million people (and growing) who have filed for their social security numbers and received benefits from the same and their deaths have been registered with the Social Security Administration or SSA.

The inaugural year for social security was 1935 and the first payments were given out after 1 Jan 1937. Thus you will be able to locate your relatives if any of your relatives died in 1937 and after. You can search a vast combination of data depending on the amount of data you already have you will be able to narrow down your search to just a few branches. The contents of the SSDI are as follows:
Name ( for females use maiden names and married names to make your search more relevant)
Date of Birth
Date of Death
Residence (this will give you zip code, city and county)
Last benefit received

Everyone who filed for social security had to fill an SS-5 form and thus you will be able to locate some basic information from it and for obtaining a copy you have to contact the SSA. One of the problems is that you must know the full name of the person you are searching for that the person had during death that is for women who are listed by their married names of their current marriage.

Also make sure that you write the person you are searching for is “DECEASED” and you can provide a printout from the Social Security Death Index as proof because if that is not the case and you are looking up a relative who is alive you must not only sign this form but also get it attested by two witnesses. Another reason is that the SSA might deny you the information if the death of your relative has not been registered on grounds of the Freedom of Information Act provisions for unwarranted invasion of privacy.

One of the best things that the SSDI search can give you is a cross checking benefit. You may have gone to a particular site to look up a social security number and then you can check the information you receive with the SSDI database again. So it is not just for double checking but in a few cases you might find that certain details like a birth date or just one of the numbers, either the day, month or year could be different and it could be error in the database or sometimes you might find alternative birthdates because of the sources might differ.

In fact you could also land up finding some other information that you haven’t seen listed anywhere before like an unknown spouse or child. Now though it is a rare occurrence but you must have patience and persistence and who knows what the results might yield.

Centuries ago, the first of hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in America. Over the years, they have appeared at America’s doorstep for a variety of reasons. In the early days of the sixteen hundreds, they came with a sense of exploration and a hope for a better life. That hope carries over into America’s immigrants even today. As time passed, people started coming for very different reasons. Many had farms destroyed in other countries and came to America with the hope to find new farms. Other came with the hope of getting an education or to find a better paying job to support their families. Still others came to get those better jobs so they could send money back to their home countries. With the world wars, many immigrants arrived in America to escape the oppression of horrible government regimes. Whatever the reason, whatever the time, this culture of immigration has made America a wonderful melting pot of cultures. It can, though, make it immensely difficult to locate family members who immigrated to America because of the sheer numbers of immigrants that have arrived over the past three centuries.

By the 1820s, American immigration numbers began to skyrocket to over ten thousand. Prior to this era, immigration was documented, but poorly. As a result, it can be a much more difficult task to track family members who immigrated to America before eighteen twenty. After that year, immigration officials began to insert more protocols into the system to ensure immigrants were tracked appropriately. By eighteen seventy, America was seeing so many immigrants, more laws were passed to limit the numbers of foreign born people into the country. As a result, any family members who came in after that time were more carefully documented, making it even easier to track them down. By the nineteen twenties, more quotas were put into place, as were more tracking regulations. All of these laws have made it easier and easier to find your family’s immigrants.

When you get ready to start your search, a date is helpful, but not necessary. There are several ways you can go about locating family members who immigrated to America. You can start by using a paid service. There are a number of these on the internet. You simply choose a service you like, offer them all of the information you have, and let them handle the tracking process for you. This can be a bit costly, but in the end, it can save you a lot of time and hassle.

If you are interested in handling the research yourself, you can start by examining passenger manifests to ships that would have carried immigrants. Again, a date here is helpful, but not completely necessary. A port of arrival is also helpful. Without these two things, you are going to spend an extensive amount of time shooting in the dark for the right passenger manifest. Some of the services that provide these indexes require payment. Others provide the service for free. Both the internet and your local library will be invaluable sources as you begin your search for passenger lists.

Another important thing you can do in your search to track your family immigrants is network with others. Try enlisting the help of other interested family members. Two heads are always better than one when you are attempting to deal with this much data. There are also literally hundreds of genealogy bulletin boards on the internet that you can consult for help. Simply post a query and wait for others to respond. If you are uncomfortable posting a query to a website, you can try posting a query in a genealogy magazine. There are several reputable publications that can help you track the family members you need to find.

One final way to attempt to track your family members is to look at indices that have already been compiled. The LDS family research center is one of the largest genealogical libraries in the world with thousands of family trees and extensive information already compiled. There are also a number of other databases available on the internet for your searching purposes. Some require a fee, others are completely free.

Searching can be a difficult process, but finally locating family members who immigrated to America can be intensely useful to your family history.

About the Authors

Paul Duxbury and Kevin Cook own http://www.amateur-genealogist.com and http://www.our-family-trees.co.uk two of the leading Genealogy Websites. In addition Paul owns a wide range of exciting websites which can be viewed at http://www.our-family-trees.co.uk