I’m planning a series of Hub Pages dealing with the difficulties in finding free genealogical information on the internet. There is plenty of free information available, but when people who are not used to searching for genealogy records start; they tend to end up getting search results that are pay sites.

If you do a search for Free Birth Records, the first couple of pages of search results tend to be the Ancestry.com affiliates, state sites selling birth certificates, sites linking to state sites, and other sites similar to Ancestry.com.

Those sites are not helpful to new genealogists. One of the first mistakes made in searching is typing a query that is too general. John Smith for example, how many John Smiths do you think have accounts at facebook, are lawyers, or some other thing that will rank high on the search results? Bunches!!!

I have found it more efficient to search for “john smith” + “jane doe”. Now you’re still going to get some crap websites that are not what you are looking for but a lot less than just John Smith would give you.

It really drives me crazy when I put in a search with the word free in it and get pay to play sites. So do not use that term EVER. The biggest scam on the net is trying to get someone to buy something that is free.

Let’s break down free birth records shall we. Ok first we drop the free, bad dog no free. Now birth records hmmm do you have ANY idea which state John was born in? Oh he was born in Massachusetts was he? So we type in Massachusetts birth records… guess what? More pay to play and state sites. You should’ve known it wasn’t going to be that easy.

There is a bright side to him being born in Massachusetts, they are the only state that uses or used to use the term Vital Records for their record books. So go to books.google.com and type in Massachusetts + “vital records”, congratulations you now have a small list of towns that have had their records published at Google Books.

You still need to narrow it down some though so we are going to add +smith to our search string. Great that narrowed it down again. Still too large a sample to deal with so we’ll go ahead and add +john, we are not putting John Smith in quotes because we are not sure it’s going to be listed together like that.

I’m going to admit now I lied to you earlier John Smith wasn’t married to Jane Doe, he was married to… ummmm… Rhoda. Yeah Rhoda. So we find that Dr. John Smith and Rhoda had a daughter named Dolly who was born on 27 Nov 1796.

Ok it wasn’t quite that easy for you because I gave a really common name, and I got to randomly pick Rhoda because I cheated and looked. But you get the idea, narrow the search parameters, and you are more likely to get returns that are actually helpful, rather than someone with their hand out wanting your money.

I also noticed that there is another search return for this couple and I learned that Rhoda’s last name before she married was Thompson. They published their intention to marry on 1 Dec 1792. Fun huh? I don’t even know these people and I’m already a little interested in what happened to them.\

Since I’m a curious sort, I decided to type in “Dr. John Smith” + MA + Rhoda just to see what I get. I get another book titled, Memorial of James Thompson, of Charlestown Mass, 1630-1642. It turns out that Rhoda’s daddy was Col. Joseph Thompson (James, Jonathan, Jonathan, James) and her mom was Abigail Sherman. Rhoda was born on 18 Dec 1773. It also notes that Rhoda and Dr. John had 7 daughters and 2 sons.

Ok that’s all for now, hope you enjoyed this lesson in Free Birth Records.