Welcome to the Beginner’s Guide to Online Family History. The Internet has revolutionized family history—it’s never been easier to find your ancestors than it is now with the number of records and tools online.

The tutorials listed below will walk you through some of the basic tools on Ancestry.com for finding your ancestors and growing your family tree.

• Lesson One—Discovering What’s Been Done walks you through searching online family trees, message board postings, and published family histories to see if others have already found your family’s information.

• Lesson Two—Starting Your Online Search: The Social Security Death Index will show you how to locate information on American citizens who died in the mid-1960s or later.

• Lesson Three—Searching the 1930 U.S. Federal Census teaches you how to find your ancestors in the largest and most recent publicly available U.S. federal census.

• Lesson Four—Finding Clues in the 1930 Census shows you how to use the clues found in the 1930 census to find other records about your ancestors.