Researching Your Family Tree From a Phone

One of the patrons I worked with most often during my library years was a man named Edmund, in his early seventies, who had become obsessed with finding out what happened to his grandmother's side of the family in Ireland. He came in every Tuesday for six years with a notebook. By the end of it, he had traced his lineage to a small village in County Cork and corresponded with three living cousins he hadn't known existed. The whole project happened mostly on his phone.

Genealogy is one of the surprise success stories of smartphone use among seniors. The records are increasingly online; the apps are increasingly good; the connections are real. Below: where to start and what to know.

Start with what you know

Before installing any app, sit down with a pen and a sheet of paper. Write down: your parents' full names and dates of birth. Your grandparents'. Any great-grandparents you remember being mentioned. Marriages, deaths, places they lived if you know them. Don't worry about gaps. The point is to start with what's in your head before consulting any computer.

Now call the oldest living relative you can think of and ask them to fill in what they know. Do this in person if possible; over the phone if not. You will be surprised how much an aunt who you haven't spoken to in five years remembers. Take notes.

This pre-work matters because the apps you're about to use want a starting point. The further back you can go on your own, the more efficiently the apps can find records.

The two main apps

FamilySearch. Free. Made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who run the largest genealogical archive in the world for theological reasons that benefit non-members too. You don't need to be a church member to use it. No upsells. Genuinely a gift to the world.

Install the app. Create an account. Start building your tree by adding the people you wrote down on paper. The app shows hints when it thinks it has found a record matching one of your relatives — a census entry, a birth certificate, a passenger manifest. Click through to verify.

FamilySearch has digitized records from over 200 countries. For US-based research, the coverage is excellent.

Ancestry.com. Paid. About $25 a month for the basic tier, $45 for the version that includes international records. Larger collection of newspapers, military records, and immigration documents than FamilySearch. Better search engine. Better hint engine.

The honest comparison: FamilySearch is free and covers most of what most US researchers need. Ancestry is faster and finds more, but you're paying for it. Most serious researchers I've helped end up with both — Ancestry for the active research phase, FamilySearch for ongoing exploration.

If budget is tight, FamilySearch alone is more than enough to get started.

What about DNA testing?

This is where the conversation gets serious. AncestryDNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage, and a few smaller services all offer mail-in DNA tests for around $99 to $149. You spit in a tube, mail it back, and a few weeks later you get a percentage breakdown of your ethnic origins plus a list of DNA-matched relatives in the company's database.

The good: DNA testing can connect you with relatives you didn't know existed. It can confirm or correct family stories. It can identify regional origins more precisely than written records alone.

The privacy issues: your DNA, once submitted, is in the company's database. The company can sell access to that database to medical researchers, law enforcement, and others — sometimes with your consent, sometimes through fine print you'd missed. Several companies have been bought, sold, or had data breaches over the years. The DNA can't be taken back.

If you're going to do DNA testing, read the privacy policy of the specific company on the day you submit. Check whether they participate in law-enforcement matching, whether they share data with research partners, and whether you can delete your data later. The answers change by company and by year.

My honest opinion: DNA testing is reasonable for someone who genuinely wants to find unknown relatives. It's not necessary for most family-tree research. Many people I've helped did extensive genealogy without DNA testing and got just as much satisfaction.

The records that work best from a phone

Several specific record types are particularly easy to search from a phone.

US Census records 1790–1950. All publicly available; both FamilySearch and Ancestry have the full set. Search by name and approximate year. The 1940 and 1950 censuses are particularly recent and detailed.

Newspaper archives. Both services subscribe to newspapers.com and similar. You can search for relatives by name and find obituaries, wedding announcements, occasional photographs. The hit rate is high for people who lived in the US in the 20th century.

Cemetery records through Find a Grave. Free app, separate from FamilySearch and Ancestry. Volunteers photograph headstones around the world. If you know where an ancestor is buried, there's a meaningful chance someone has photographed the grave.

Immigration records through Ellis Island and Castle Garden manifests. Both are searchable through Ancestry; partially searchable for free through ellis.island.org.

The frustration to expect

Spelling. Names were spelled however the immigration clerk happened to spell them. Your great-grandmother who family lore calls "Bridget Sullivan" might appear in the manifest as "Bridgit O'Sulivan." Searching requires creativity. Try variants. Drop the first letter. Try just the surname.

Gaps. Some records were destroyed in fires, lost in archive moves, never digitized. You'll hit walls. Sometimes you can get around them by finding a sibling whose records survived; sometimes you can't.

Dead ends. Some lines simply stop. A man born "around 1840" to parents "unknown" in a port town that lost its records. That's where the research ends. Accept it.

Edmund and County Cork

Edmund's project took six years. The first three were almost entirely on paper and at the library reference desk. The next three were almost entirely on his phone in the Ancestry and FamilySearch apps. He found a great-great-grandfather's baptism record from 1843. He found three living cousins in Ireland through a combination of Ancestry's relative-matching and good old letter writing.

One of those cousins visited the United States in 2022. Edmund met her in person at the Boulder Public Library, which he thought was the appropriate setting. She gave him a small package of family photographs his grandmother had sent home to Ireland in 1921 that he had never seen.

That moment — a cousin he didn't know existed, in the library where he'd done most of the research, with the photographs in his hands — was not the kind of thing a smartphone is normally associated with. But the smartphone did most of the work to get there. The phone is just a tool; what it can help you find is sometimes considerable.

Written by Margaret Holloway. Last verified 19 June 2026.