Find your ancestors
who came to America

A birth certificate feels like the most basic, most reliable document in genealogy. A person was born, the event was recorded, and the facts are right there on the page. But birth certificates are not as straightforward as they appear — and the assumptions people make about them cause more research errors than almost any other record type.

You found a name. You found a date. You found a place. And you were so excited that you added it straight to your tree without writing down where it came from. Three months later, you cannot remember whether that birth date came from a census record, a family bible, or your second cousin's email. It happens to everyone — and it is the single most damaging mistake in genealogy research.

Discover how WWI changed the naturalization process for immigrant soldiers and what records were created

If your ancestor arrived in America in the late 1790s and you're trying to find their naturalization papers, you may run into something puzzling: the timeline doesn't add up. They arrived in 1798, but they didn't naturalize until 1815. You might assume the records are incomplete,

Every family has a version of the immigration story. It usually goes something like this: great-great-grandfather came over from the old country, worked hard, built a life. Maybe there's a detail about the boat, or the name getting changed

Look at almost any immigrant family tree from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and the pattern is nearly universal: German immigrants married Germans, Polish immigrants married Poles, Italian immigrants married Italians. Even immigrants who had been in America for years, who spoke English, who worked alongside people from other backgrounds