People in the Bowling Green area have the opportunity to learn more about their family’s history by using the genealogy tracing website Ancestry.com for free at the Wood County Library.

Michelle Raine, an employee at the library, said the service was first offered in 2008 and each month the database ranks at the top of the library’s most popular offered database services.

Anne May is also an employee at the library and said that as long as a person has a Wood County Library card, the use of Ancestry.com during a visit to the library comes at no charge. According to Ancestry’s website, a basic monthly membership (access to all U.S. records on Ancestry.com) costs $19.99 per month.

The only difference between using the library’s subscription to the service as opposed to purchasing a subscription from home is that a person’s searches and findings cannot be saved when using the library’s version, Raine said.

Ancestry subscriber Kelsey Rausch said that she and her family joined the database in order to learn more about her father’s ancestral history.

She said that her father had always had a number of names of family members, but had no knowledge about specific dates or other details.

“We actually found out that we are part Jewish through [the database], which is exciting,” Rausch said.

Along with this, the Rausch family learned that they have ancestors from more places than they were aware of, including Scotland and Luxembourg.

Rausch said that the biggest downside to the service is the amount of information that a person has to search through in order to find what pertains to them.

The website responds to searches by offering a lot of information about a person and this includes information about people with similar names, Rausch said,

“You have to manually sift through the people to see if they match up with your own personal records,” she said.

However, Rausch said that the website produced information about family members dating back to the 1600s.

“I would definitely recommend this service to others interested in learning more about their family’s history,” Rausch said.

The library occasionally offers classes on how to use the website and that the next class is in the planning process and should be held this summer, Raine said.

Besides classes, Raine said that there are also employees at the library who are there to help visitors navigate the database if they are unfamiliar.

The database offers a number of historical documents including immigration records from different countries as well as a look at census records, Raine said,

“It really helps tell the story of your family when you can see the original documents,” Raine said.

The Wood County Library also hosts different workshops that involve ancestral history. The most recent workshop was titled “Searching for Your Immigrant Ancestors.”

Workshops like this really help people “understand history of immigration in our country,” Raine said.

The next workshop is scheduled for April 8 at the library and is titled, “Discover Your German Roots.” The event will focus on the settling of German immigrants in the Northwest Ohio area.