Find your long lost relatives

what is the best search engine for tracing family history for free?

i am trying to trace my grandfather father who fought in the first world war have tried ancestry.com and wishing to use a service for free

There is a basic reality that the internet has limitations. You don’t mention which country you’re in, but privacy laws keep a lot of records off the internet. Even WWI is too recent for some countries. There are also individual states in the US and provinces of Canada that have joined countries like Spain, Mexico, Italy and Portugal in saying they will not be adding new records to the internet databases. They believe there has been too much abuse of public records on the internet and they’re just not going to join the fray. If you want records in those places that aren’t already published, you’ll have to either order the films from the LDS or visit the archives that holds them.

I would honestly suggest that if you’re at a roadblock, post what you do know about him and the sources you’ve already used and let us see if we can find more. Some people on this board have access to a broad range of websites that you may or may not have used yet. If we all hit the same roadblock, then you need to move off the internet and into the libraries and Family History Center to find the non-digitized records.