Can’t find my last name!!!!?

I want to look up myy families history, but my last name is so uncommon that it’s hard to find. I’ve used ancestry.com and I have found my last name, but all the people on there are from Germany. I live in the USA and as far as I know, my family has been here for a long time except from when they were brought here from Africa. My current family members are no help since they seem to not know anything past my great grandfather. How would I go about finding more about my family without having to empty my pockets to do it? And does that DNA family search thing work? I’ve only read a few articles about it and all those people were able to trace back hundreds of years.
Sorry for the misspelled words in there.

If I was you I would start a Family tree on a free site like:

http://www.tribalpages.com/

Start with yourself and work your way back! You would be surprised at how much this helps in organizing your search. I am sure that your family can help with their birth dates, kids names, parents names, and brother and sisters names.

WHEN starting a tree ALWAYS start with the present!

You need to take what you know and “weed” out the information that isn’t from your family. Although there isn’t good records for African Americans, before the Civil War there should be information to be had from census records from the 1910, 1920 and 1930 census records.

You might get lucky and others may have done some work on your family tree. Goggle family members names i.e. “Mary Smith” + “family tree”

Free sites:

http://www.searchforancestors.com/

http://www.censusrecords.net/?o_xid=27399&o_lid=27399

http://www.usgenweb.com/

http://www.census.gov/

http://www.rootsweb.com/

http://www.ukgenweb.com/

http://www.archives.gov/

http://www.familysearch.org/

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/

http://www.cyndislist.com/

http://www.findagrave.com/

You can also put posts on Message boards, someone out there may be working on the same family line as you.

Genealogy message board:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/messageboards/newguide/?board=history

http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?webtag=ab-genealogy&nav=messages&lgnF=y&msg=90.1

http://boards.ancestry.com/

http://www.gensource.com/common/search.cfm

http://messages.yahoo.com/yahoo/Family___Home/Genealogy/

http://genforum.genealogy.com/

http://www.genealogyforum.com/messages/

http://www.progenealogists.com/messageboards.htm

http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/boards.php?boardId=56406&func=2&channel=aol+research+and+learn&refresh=true

http://boards.rootsweb.com/

I’ve been using http://www.ancestry.com/ for a while now and know a few tricks to find information. If you send me names and birth years of the people you are looking for I will see what I can find.

Good luck!

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