Discover your Family Tree
Archive for February, 2010
Family History
Feb 21st
Researching your family history can be one of the most fulfilling and exciting things you will ever do in your life. If you have any curiosity at all, finding your roots through finding your family in history is a rewarding experience.
For many, family history and genealogy are two separate fields of study. Genealogy is the study of ancestors usually limited to finding their names and dates and places of birth, marriage and death. For those studying family history however, that is just the beginning – the clothes line, so to speak, upon which we can hang all sorts of interesting things about their lives and their place in history.
Of course, you need to know your ancestors’ names and some basic facts about their life, and for many the quest stops there. In fact, if you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and are providing the names of your ancestors for proxy temple ordinances, that is all the information you need. But take a closer look at their lives. Your ancestors were flesh and blood human beings with hopes and dreams and trials just like you. Some of them did heroic things in their lives. Some of them might be scoundrels, but those are the things that make them interesting. For me, one of my Scottish great grandmothers is a person of great interest. She died at the age of 31, after the birth of her 9th child, in the mid 1700s! Had I just written down her name and dates and not stopped to calculate her age and see how many children she had, I would never have felt the gratitude I have for her. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult her life must have been, or what her husband did with nine children under the age of about 15, the youngest a newborn, and yes, they had all survived.
So how do you go about creating a history around your family? First, you get as much information on your family as you can – that includes names, dates and places of birth (or baptism), marriage and death (or burial) from written documents or, if they lived in a society with no written records or those records were either forbidden or lost, oral history. Then you begin to do like I did by calculating ages, looking at naming patterns and searching for gaps in ages that might make you think a child had been lost. Then you collect information on the area where they lived by referring to gazetteers, local histories and maps. Sometimes these records will let you know about events that happened during your ancestors’ lifetime. Perhaps a battle was fought nearby. Could your family have been involved either as a participant who could have been wounded or as a bystander who could smell the smoke and perhaps rendered aid? Research the records that tell about the Industrial Revolution or the French Revolution or the American Civil War. Military records sometimes give physical descriptions of soldiers. Was your ancestor tall and dark or short with grey eyes?
Take a close look at maps when working on your family history, especially topographical maps. Where was the nearest market town for your ancestors? How far did they have to walk to church? What was the terrain like? If you are finding them in one town in particular but can’t find where they lived before then, could they have traveled down a nearby river and what towns are above their current residence?
Is there a difference in ages of the husband and wife? If he is considerably older, she might be a second or even third wife. Is there a gap in the ages of ‘their’ children? Perhaps that is when he lost his first wife and married the second. What was his occupation? While women did work, especially after the Industrial Revolution, the variety of options for them was limited. Men’s occupations, however, can give a clue to what their lives were like.
Yes, you have probably guessed that I am very much into family history. I am a product of the lives of those who came before me.
Genealogy
Feb 10th
People can be interested in their genealogy for a lot of different reasons. It may be simple curiosity or they may want to know their medical history, their family’s place in history or to prove an inheritance. When I worked in Edinburgh, Scotland, searching other people’s genealogy I did several searches for heirs of people who had died in Scotland with no immediate kin. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may also want to trace their genealogy with the goal of having proxy temple ordinances performed on their behalf, with the eternal goal of sealing families together.
Having an interest in your genealogy and knowing how to go about finding it are sometimes two separate things. There are a lot of different places to start and along the way you will start learning about your family history. Genealogy is the accumulation of names, dates and places but your ancestors were much more than facts. They lived lives just like yours – with joy, hopes, sorrows, disappointments and challenges. If you really want to learn about your ancestors, please do more than search for the easy stuff. Find out what was happening around them historically. I recently found out that an adopted great uncle was one of the Orphan Train children who was sent “out west” by perhaps one of the two main societies in New York City but, since my family lived in Canada at the time, he could have been one of the “British Home Children” sent from England. According to http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/archive/displayGuide.aspx?sid=12&mode=html&sorStr=&serStr=&pgeInt=&catStr, between 1870 and 1914 more than 80,000 children were sent to Canada alone as part of the Farm School Movement. Since Wilfred was probably born in the early 1900s, he might have been part of this group. He left home at an early age and perhaps under less-than-desirable circumstances because my great aunt and grandmother would not say much about him. Another mystery!
Whether or not you are searching for your genealogy for the purpose of temple work, you can begin by seeing what other people have already found on your genealogy. Everyone can access the free web site www.familysearch.org to see what information is there. Those who are not members of the Church will not be able to access temple information but everything else is available to them. Use caution and document what you find there. You can also begin your genealogy by talking to relatives, visiting cemeteries and looking for photos, newspaper clippings, diaries or journals, letters, mementos such as military uniforms or papers, school records etc in your own home or those of others (with their permission, of course). Attend family reunions and ask lots of pointed questions. Ask whether a book of genealogy has already been published. The more you learn about your genealogy, the more blanks there will be to fill in and the more questions you will have.
When you start gathering information, it is essential to organize it in some way. However you start, it will likely change and expand as you go along. Try starting with paper and pencil. They are portable and you can enter the data into a software program later if you wish. Make long-lasting copies of photos and other documents and keep them safe. There are two basic forms that your genealogy will take – pedigree charts and family group sheets. Both are available in paper form or can be printed from software programs. Pedigree charts begin with you and show your parents, your two sets of grandparents, their parents and so forth. Each family group sheet shows a couple and all their children, and may include room for spouses but no other details on them. Every ancestor will appear at least twice in your genealogy, once as a parent and again as a child.
As you continue your search, you will get into original records kept mainly by churches and governments. This may involve using microfilm or locating web sites that specialize in the kinds of records that will give you the information you need. At some point though, everyone comes to an end of the records and their research. That is the sad part!
Free Genealogy Search
Feb 1st
Nowadays, a lot of us may feel overwhelmed by the amount of instant information that is currently available on the internet with regards to doing our genealogical research. When I started my degree program in family history at Brigham Young University “back in the day”, we took courses in paleography and history as well as in research sources for different geographical areas. BYU offered a bachelor’s degree and one could go on to become accredited in certain countries by taking a lengthy and exhausting two-day exam. Today much of that has changed.
I’m giving away my age here but I’m not sure the internet had been invented when I graduated. We used resources provided by the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, some of which was available at the university. We made frequent trips to Salt Lake. Except for the cost of gas, doing genealogy research was free.
Today much of that has changed. We rely more on the internet to do our free genealogy search. It is convenient and, other than the cost of subscription to an internet provider (which can be eliminated by going to a public library or internet café), there is usually no charge. There are many good, reliable sources for doing free genealogy searches. Most of them would qualify as secondary sources; that is, sources compiled from original records and pre-digested, if you will, for our consumption. When you rely on this type of free genealogy search, you take several risks.
First, you may not know for sure that the line you are following is yours. Unless you make a positive connection with someone else’s compilation, you may take off at the wrong starting gate. Then there are problems with another person’s translation of handwriting (“Is that David or Daniel?”), with their conclusions and with their typographical errors. Even if you are looking at a site that has transcribed tombstone inscriptions from a cemetery, the stone may have been so badly worn that what it says is only a guess.
Rife with problems are indexes, and there are a lot of them out there, even on web sites that provide search material for your genealogy that is not free. Someone in “Chumbalumba”, as the commercial says, may not be familiar with the spelling of your particular surname. I have even seen English-speaking Americans index names incorrectly. For example, I searched for a long time for several families with the surname Knox. I couldn’t find any of them until I accidently found them indexed as Rnox! That is not even a possible combination of letters in the United States!
Please don’t mistake me – I’m not saying not to use these free genealogy searches – but please do use them wisely. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try to imagine what the original handwriting might have looked like. Could someone have translated “Ma.” for Mary when you are looking for Margaret? Please do not get hung up on the spelling of a surname. Mackenzie and McKenzie and MacKenzy are all the same name. Watch out for “Jos.” which could be Joseph, Joshua or Josephine.
Use the results of your free genealogy search as a sort of map to let you know where you might look for documents to verify those results. You will very rarely find original documents when you do a free genealogy search unless you sign up for a free trial on a web site of interest. The only guaranteed places to find original documents for free are at the Family History Library (and its associated family history centers – but even then you can run into problems with the quality of microfilming), and depositories of documents such as courthouses, churches, government offices and sometimes historical or genealogical societies.
