Five Facebook groups worth a look for family history
Facebook is a strange place to keep doing research in 2026, and it's still where a lot of the useful genealogy conversation happens. Here are five groups to start with.
Facebook is not where anyone would design a research community from scratch. The search is bad, good answers sink out of sight within a day, and nothing is indexed anywhere you can find it later.
And yet a lot of the genealogy conversation still happens there, especially the AI side of it, which is moving too fast for forums and books to keep up with. So here are five groups worth a look.
Quick honesty note: these are pointers, not reviews. I’m listing them because the topics are useful and the names tell you what you’re getting. I’m not reporting member counts or vouching for how active any of them is, because that changes weekly and you can see it yourself in about five seconds.
The AI ones
Genealogy and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Does what the name says. This is the general-purpose room for “has anyone tried X on their records yet”.
Same territory, different room. Worth joining both, honestly. These groups overlap a lot but the crowds differ, and so do the answers you get.
Ancestors and Algorithms: AI for Genealogy
Best name of the bunch. Same subject area again.
Three groups on one topic sounds like too many, and it probably is. Join all three for a couple of weeks, see which one actually answers questions, then leave the other two. That costs you nothing and tells you more than reading anyone’s recommendation.
The tool one
For the specific problem of getting Ancestry to do what you want. User groups like this tend to be more useful than official support, because the people in them have hit your exact wall already.
The one that isn’t like the others
Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (RAOGK USA)
RAOGK is an old idea and a good one: volunteers who will do a local lookup for someone who can’t get there. A courthouse record, a photo of a headstone, a check of a local archive.
This is the one I’d point a beginner to first, and not for the AI reasons. No tool solves “the record is on paper, in a building, four thousand miles away”. A person nearby does.
If you use it, read the group rules before posting. Volunteer groups run on goodwill and they all have a preferred format for requests.
How to actually get value out of these
Search before posting. Facebook search is bad but it’s not useless, and your question has almost certainly been asked. You’ll usually find a better thread than the one you were about to start.
Save the good answers somewhere else. This is the big one. Anything useful you find in a Facebook group is effectively gone in a month. Copy it into your own notes with a link and the date, or accept that you’ll be asking again next year.
Watch for confident nonsense on the AI threads. Not out of cynicism, it’s just where we are. Plenty of people are posting tool output as fact, especially transcriptions and “restored” photos. Treat anything you pick up as a lead to check, not an answer.
Got a group that should be on this list? Send it over.