Ancestry Databases

Ancestry Databases is a rich starting point for piecing together family history from several different angles: passenger arrivals, cemetery records, military archives, shared family trees, historical documents, and DNA connections. If you’re chasing an immigrant ancestor, the Arrival Records Collection from the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation helps search U.S. arrival records across Ellis Island and other ports, with guidance for interpreting names and results. For gravesite evidence and memorial research, BillionGraves and Find a Grave offer community-built cemetery records, photos, locations, relationships, and memorial details that can help confirm dates, places, and family links. Fold3 brings a more focused lens to military records, with searchable material across major conflicts and selected non-military collections.

The subcategory also includes tools for building and expanding the tree itself. Family Tree Builder, MyHeritage, Geni, and WikiTree all support family-tree research in different ways, from downloadable tree management and GEDCOM import to collaborative shared trees, source-backed profiles, media uploads, charts, reports, and record matching. For those interested in genetic genealogy, 23andMe and MyHeritage DNA offer ancestry testing and DNA-relative matching, with 23andMe also extending into inherited health risks and related genetic insights depending on the plan. Taken together, these resources are especially useful because they don’t all answer the same question: some help you find a name in a record, some help you place a person in a community or cemetery, and others help connect your research with living relatives or broader shared family lines.