WALK OF FAME
Few cultural institutions got hit harder by the pandemic than the cinema. But recent box office numbers suggest that Hollywood is making a comeback. Spider-Man: No Way Home late last year quickly became the third highest-grossing film in the United States, and the anticipation behind this summer’s blockbusters (from Top Gun: Maverick to Jurassic World: Dominion) underscores how ready many are to escape to the theater.
The movies can inspire a craving for popcorn. But can they also inspire your genealogy research? Our annual list of the 101 Best Genealogy Websites is here to answer with an emphatic yes! Whether your family-history finds are shocking (“Luke, I am your father”) or merely satisfying (“Auntie Em, there’s no place like home”), these websites will help you click your way to stardom.
As usual, the honor-worthy sites here are mostly free unless noted otherwise with a dollar sign ($). Those premium sites require a subscription or other payment to really get the most value from their content. Also as usual, we’ve marked sites that were not in last year’s list with an asterisk (*).
To make room for more of those new or returning genealogy sites, we’ve left a bunch of familiar social-media destinations on the cutting-room floor. We’ve also once again skipped sites annually singled out in our listing of 75 best state sites—but, in a first for us, they have their own section in this same issue, on pages 24 and 25.
Enough housekeeping! Fire up the popcorn popper and bring out the Jujubes or Sno-Caps. Silence your cellphones and settle into your seats. Your family tree is ready for its close-up.
“BIG” GENEALOGY WEBSITES
Ancestry.com $
Everything’s bigger at Ancestry.com, now totaling 30 billion records and 10,000 terabytes of data, including 200 million names newly culled from sister site Newspapers.com marriage announcements and records from recently acquired Geneanet. Full global access to records runs $300 per year, and you can add the records of fellow honorees Newspapers.com and Fold3 with the All Access membership ($400/year). The AncestryDNA test ($99, but often on sale) has refined its ethnicity estimates, with more than 1,500 genetic communities represented.
FamilySearch
Now accessible in 30 languages, this alwaysfree site recently added 28 million records from 20th-century US military muster rolls. Drawing on the vast resources of the Family History Library, FamilySearch ranges from macro resources such as censuses to micro-collections such as county children’s home records.
Findmypast $
Recent interface improvements,
