Hi Paul! Welcome to WikiTree. I am Dave Draper and one of the volunteer greeters.
A quick way to find the Collins on WikiTree is to start a search in Google. Type in: WikiTree Collins
When I did it many Collins profiles came up. I looked for the ones in the southern states and there are quite a few.
Remember, your grandfathers and grandmothers left traces of who they were. There is a little bit of a paper trail left somewhere. They have to be buried somewhere! They had to have had children, those children had children! They are buried somewhere.
Start with what you know. Create profiles for your mom and dad, then your grandparents, as much as you know about them. If you don't know birth or death years, you can estimate. If you don't know locations, then put United States.
There is a technique called "fanning out" which dives in to all the people that could have lived around your family and had dealings with them. These are just a few suggestions. Think like a police detective would trying to find a missing person. The clues are there!
And, of course, there are many here who can help when you ask the right questions.
Start using Find A Grave. Search for every Collins burials in North Carolina or Mississippi. To find some of my family I created a free space page here to find every Draper burial I could, and 4,600 burials later, I found more of my family.
Sign up for Family Search. Its free, but you have to join. They have birth records, census records, marriage records and much more on their profiled database.
