It can be difficult to find out about your ancestry if most of your family have passed away, and live out of state. But it can be done! How much you can find out all depends on what lengths you want to go to.

Finding your relatives and learning about ancestry
The first thing you should do is find out as much as you can from your living relatives. Try to get as many names, dates of birth/death, marriages, addresses and stories that you can follow up on to try to find out more.
With the information you have you can investigate further by looking into public records.
If you're looking out of state then you probably want to do this online. You should check out this website. It gives you links to all of the official state websites where hopefully you might be able to find out some more about your history.
Otherwise you can visit the public records office and dig around in the actual copies of things yourself.
It's not an easy process, you'll need a lot of patience, and all the help you can get along the way from anyone with information about your history, but it is out there. You just have to find it. Good luck!