Most of us want to know about our immigrant ancestor, the one who came across a border or crossed an ocean to come to America.  Unless you are a first generation immigrant, you have to work with United States (or the country of your birth) records first. It is surprising how many people seek help in looking for an 8th- great-grandparent. They have not prepared yet by starting with themselves, then their parents, grandparents and so forth. We build our pedigree one generation at a time, sourcing our information with record citations to verify our conclusions as we go back in time. It is the only way to get accurate results.

The Family History Guide provides excellent directions for us in understanding what kinds of records are available, what they contain, and how to analyze them and much more. See Discover in the dropdown menu under FS as an example.

The Family History Guide has four dropdown menus for each of the Partner Pages on the Homepage. There is one for Family Search (FS), Ancestry (AN), My Heritage (MH), and Findmypast (FMP). They each share a dropdown selection called Countries.  This is one of my favorite sections on the website. Here you will find wonderful information on all the states in the United States and many countries in the world. Let’s select Countries, and let’s take a look at a state by choosing Missouri.

Tip:  You might want to set your monitor to a side-by-side view as you do this, so you can see this page and open The Family History Guide in the other screen.

Now let’s take a look at Missouri.  At the top of the page if you look at Missouri Goals, you can learn about Research and Records, Archives and Libraries, Vital and Census Records, Church and Cemetery Records, Emigration and Immigration, Military Records, Probate, Land and Court Records, Maps and Gazetteers, Newspapers, Websites, Searching Records and Getting Help.  Each U.S. state has Goals, Choices and Steps to help you learn sequentially. The page includes Resources like articles and videos. You can even click on the banner of each page to go directly to Wikipedia for more general information about each place.

Look At the QUIKlinks at the top of the Missouri page. The first four are to record collections the rest are to websites. Click on the Family Search QUIKlinks. Up comes a search bar where you enter your ancestor’s information. Only about 1/3 of the records in the Family Search Record Collections are indexed and searchable by the ancestor’s name. Don’t forget to scroll down farther to where the Browseable Records Collections are. These are extremely valuable as well.

The remarkable thing about this is ALL the states and most of the countries have the exact type of page. Try checking a favorite country also!

Tip:  To help anyone else get started, go here to these State or Country pages to find their states or countries, or if they have Ethnic Research to do in  African American Records, Asian, Native American, etc. You’ll find everything you need right at your fingertips. What a remarkable tool The Family History Guide is, as it continues to add new content all the time to make our lives easier, more efficient and much more enjoyable!