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Samantha:
There are a couple of things you can do for free to get you started. First, if you know your dad's date of birth and/or date of death you can start w/ a Census look up or Social Security Death Index (SSDI) lookup if you only have the date of his passing & not his birthdate.
With your dad's birthdate, you might be able to look him up at the LDS Family Search page (that's the Church of Latter Day Saints, as in the Morman's). That website is: www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp. They also have a link w/ the SSDI, so if you want to look up his death info, you do that to from another page/link at the LDS site. Their site has a lot of stuff, so it is worth the time to explore it to see how things work. The bottom line is, on occassion when you look up one of your ancestors or known relatives & find them either in the SSDI or Cenus, there MIGHT be a pedigree available for you to follow. But that would be only if some other relative had researched your line, or a line tangent to your's and entered it into the LDS files. Explore w/ family members who you have a lot of data on to see what works and then narrow in on your dad. It takes some time to learn how each site works and what you can uncover, so don't be afraid to 'play around', if you catch my jist.
Many communities across the nation have churches and/or genealogy libraries in them, so you don't have to feel you must go to Utan to access their files. But not everything they have on paper is online, which is why it would be good for you to see if they have a facility near where you live. Check you phone book, or the LDS site.
For Census info, I just discovered a service that did not used to be available until recently, as far as I know. Google: Heritage Quest Online + the state where you currently reside. HQ (Heritage Quest) online is a service that many libraries subscribe to and if you have a library card you might be able to access that database from your home, if you don't want to go to the library to do it. HQ has census date from 1790 up to part of 1930. Some library systems are statewide, others, like Sarasota Cty, FL - where I am, are by county. So, if you know your library is countywide you'd need to add the county name to the google search. If don't narrow it down you'll be going thru pages of google results w/ ALL the various sites/insitutions that subscribe to HQ. The faster way is to zero in on where you live as quick as possible.
For example, when I googled HQ, I FIRST did: "Heritage Quest Online", then I saw all the state id's coming up (& PAGES of links to explore) so I went back up to the search box and added my state. So it looked like this: "Heritage Quest online, Florida". Once I saw some FL locations coming up in the results, I knew I might have a chance and went back up to the search box and added my county. The final search looked like this: "Heritage Quest online, Florida, Sarasota" (the commas between items are important). Bingo!! And I've been looking at Census data for FREE all day (most of the genealogy websites want you to pay for a membership in order to access their Census records). IF your dad was born before 1920, you might be able to locate him in this database.
One word of caution for HQ's scanned Census pages that I've discovered thru my searches today. Census data from year to year, or enumeration to enumeration, can be "funny". What I mean by that is sometimes you will only get a hit for the Head of the Household & when you find that person on the roll page, you'll see the entire family. Other years you can type in the wife or child's name and get a list that shows all the members, click on any link and find the entire family. Takes some experimentation with each enumeration see to how each year got digitized. Example: 1860 pings on only head of household. In either 1880 or 1870, when I did a search for one Dodson ancester, I found him even when he was the brother living in a household that he was not the head of. Understand??? The biggest problem you might run into using the HQ census data to find your dad would be his age, as not all of the 1930 census has been scanned in, & when I saw that PA, NH & MA weren't there, I didn't really look to see what states were.
If you're a sophisticated computer & internet person (aka: "techno geek"), then please forgive me if my explanations are long & "boring". By the nature of your question I guessed you might be new at this, so I took a real basic level approach. But, if you're used to doing informational searches for other things, the process for people is similar, you just have to know where to start looking.
One last area that's been successful for me has been the Rootsweb project, which, unfortunatly got bought out/purchased by Ancestry.com. Rootsweb used to be independent from them. They have a fairly sophisticated search page where you plug in what you know & if anyone else has done research & created a pedigree/ancester tree that happens to include some your family members, you can find out people you didn't even know you might be related to. Caution: a lot of the genealogies online are not always "proven" - meaning they are someone else's, often amateur work that does not have notes, citations, etc & could be inaccurate; so don't assume everything you find is accurate unless you're viewing the source data. The reason I say it's "unfortunate" is some of your searches may get hits where you see "3 references to {name of person} in # of databases at Ancestry.com". Then when you follow the link, you find out the data you thought you found was in the paid members section only.
Well, didn't mean to write you a "book". Seems things you can say in a few sentances take dozens when written. If you have any questions and would prefer to communicate w/ me directly, you can write me at: w_a_king_venice@earthlink.net. Unfortunately, my Dodson ancesters are all up in PA & MD, so I don't think I'd have any links to your dad. Today, I finally located my gggrfather who emigrated from Ireland sometime before 1844. Been trying to find him for years. Found him in the 1860 Census thru Heritage Quest.
Good Luck,
Wendy A. King
Venice, FL
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