Utilizing Your Phone’s Free Tools to Trace Your Ancestry

Are you looking for a unique and meaningful way to spend your summer vacation? Well, for those interested in discovering their roots, spending time in graveyards and libraries may be the perfect “family” vacation.

While genealogy sites have made researching one’s ancestral history easier with digitized archives and family-tree-building software, not everything is online. That’s why visiting libraries, archives, and cemeteries can provide valuable information about your ancestors.

But fear not, technology can still be your best friend on these research trips. With your smartphone or tablet in hand, you can use translation tools, document scanners, and more to make your research more efficient.

For deciphering text in old newspapers, religious registries, and government documents, apps like Google Lens and Apple’s Live Text feature can help with onscreen translations. And if you’re still struggling with handwritten records or garbled translations, free translation apps like Google Translate and Apple’s Translate app can provide some assistance.

When you come across documents that haven’t been digitized, you can use your phone to scan them with apps like Google Drive or Apple’s Notes app. And for digitizing photos in old yearbooks and collections, your phone’s camera and photo-editing tools can quickly capture and enhance the images.

If you’re looking to find graves of ancestors, online resources like Find a Grave and BillionGraves can help point you to burial plots and provide photographs of headstones. BillionGraves even offers subscriptions for more features like GPS coordinates of burial sites.

So, if you’re ready to embark on a journey to discover your family history, don’t forget to pack your smartphone and tablet for a tech-savvy research adventure in graveyards and libraries this summer.