[ssharp5278]

I love learning about the origins of people. I would like to further research my fathers line and the earliest thing I can find is that our immigrant ancestor came from England. I know that there are tons of genealogy sites but I dont want to pay money and then not find anything. So I was wondering if there is anyone out there that has any information regarding the Sharp surname?

[Ted Pack]

[url]http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi[/url]















has 250,000+ entries for the surname.































15 of your 16 great great grandparents were probably not named Sharp, remember.































Here's my standard answer:































There are over 400,000 free genealogy sites. I have links to some huge ones, below, but you'll have to wade through some advice and warnings first.































If you didn't mention a country, we can't tell if you are in the USA, UK, Canada or Australia. I'm in the USA and my links are for it.































If you are in the USA,















AND most of your ancestors were in the USA,















AND you can get to a library or FHC with census access,















AND you are white















Then you can get most of your ancestors who were alive in 1850 with 100 - 300 hours of research. You can only get to 1870 if you are black, sadly. Many young people stop reading here and pick another hobby.































No web site is going to tell you how your great grandparents decorated the Christmas tree with ornaments cut from tin foil during the depression, how Great Uncle Elmer wooed his wife with a banjo, or how Uncle John paid his way through college in the 1960's by smuggling herbs. Talk to your living relatives before it is too late.































You won't find living people on genealogy sites. You'll have to get back to people living in 1930 or so by talking to relatives, looking up obituaries and so forth.































Finally, not everything you read on the internet is true. You have to be cautious and look at people's sources. Cross-check and verify.































So much for the warnings. Here is the main link.































[url]http://www.tedpack.org/yagenlinks.html[/url]































That page has links, plus tips and hints on how to use the sites, for a dozen huge free sites. Having one link here in the answer and a dozen links on my personal site gets around two problems. First, Y!A limits us to 10 links in an answer. Second, if one or more of the links are popular, I get We're taking a breather when I try to post the answer. This is a bug introduced sometime in August 2008 with the new look.































You will need the tips. Just for instance, most beginners either put too much data into the RWWC query page, or they mistake the Ancestry ads at the top for the query form. I used to teach a class on Internet Genealogy at the library. I watched the mistakes beginners made. The query forms on the sites are NOT intuitive.

[Syntinen Laulu]

Bear in mind that Sharp or Sharpe as a surname comes from a nickname - it meant keen, clever, alert. Anybody who had that type of personality could have been given that nickname and passed it on to their descendants as a surname, so there are many families called Sharp that are quite unrelated to each other.