Discover your Family Tree
Archive for May, 2010
Search Ancestry
May 7th
Searching for Your Ancestry
The word “ancestry” refers not only to one’s parents, grandparents and so forth, but also to one of the largest internet web sites that has been set up to help people search for that ancestry. In this article we will discuss both aspects of the term.
When you search for your ancestry, you will want to start with what you already know. That may be with your parents, grandparents or maybe yourself. I had a student one semester whose goal for the course was to locate his father. He knew next-to-nothing about his father but started with his parents’ marriage certificate and a couple of phone calls to distant relatives and, by the end of the semester, he had located him. Unfortunately, he had died a decade before but the student was able to go to the cemetery which was located in Arizona, if I remember correctly.
If you just jump into your search for your ancestry without verifying the data you already have, you run a great risk of following someone else’s line, not yours. Even worse, some people have heard that they are related to some famous person and want to prove that but, instead of working back from the known to the unknown, they start with the famous person and follow that line down, hoping that they end up with themselves. Usually they are disappointed and have wasted time, money, effort and hope.
There are a number of steps and lots of documents you can search for information on your ancestry. Start with home sources, those items that can be found in your home or the home of a relative, and don’t forget to interview the relative while you’re at it! Once you have gathered information, sit down and prepare to take some amount of time to sort it all out and write it down. Get organized and don’t rush things. I try to compartmentalize my ancestry by family and concentrate on one family at a time.
Once you have organized your home sources, start filling in the blanks. Decide what you want to find out, what documents are most likely to give you that information, and where they are located. If you are looking for a marriage date, government or church records will give you that. Where you look will depend on the time period. Before governments began keeping records, marriage, baptism and burial records were the domain of churches. If the record is kept by a governmental body, it should be relatively easy to locate. Church records are another matter. They could have been kept by a minister when he retired, lost in a move, sent to a central church depository, or microfilmed and available for free at your local family history center. The web site, www.familysearch.org offers Research Guidance pages to help you decide what records to search for your ancestry, including those they have already microfilmed.
If what you are looking for is not easily available on microfilm, you may want to subscribe to one or more web sites that specialize in helping you with your ancestry search. One of the largest of these is www.ancestry.com. They collect data sources from around the world, including but not limited to the United States, Canada and Britain, index them and digitize the original (when possible) so researchers can find what they are looking for quickly. Some people get upset when internet sites charge them to search for their ancestry, especially for government records which they can get for free by going to the relevant office. However, the sites not only supply the original document but spend a great deal of money to index millions of records for your benefit. You save drive time, gas and hotel expenses, and research time by subscribing to a site you can search at your leisure in your pajamas. You do need to be aware of the drawbacks – misreading handwriting and typographical errors.
So, when you search for your ancestry, be aware of both meanings of the term “ancestry”. When you have done the leg work, you may want to subscribe to a web site called Ancestry.
Free Family Tree
May 2nd
When you find a family tree for free, please recognize that someone else has gone to a great deal of time, effort and perhaps expense to make that information available to you. You are the beneficiary of their hard work.
There are several ways to find out whether someone has prepared a free family tree for you or one of your ancestors. One is simply to ask your relatives if anyone in the family has done any work on the family tree and would be willing to share it with you. Most people who research family history are not doing it for profit but for the love of it. They are usually very willing to share their findings with others. If they have incurred expenses along the way, they may ask for a donation to help defray the costs. Family reunions are great places to go to get more information for free on your family tree. Not only can you get the genealogy (names, dates and places) but you are more likely to get stories about your ancestors’ lives and personalities.
Another way to find out if there is a free family tree is to type the name of one of your ancestors into a search engine such as Google or Ask. If someone has prepared a family history or gone to the effort of putting it on the internet, then you immediately benefit. Please make sure you actually do tie into the free family tree you are looking at! There is a greater variety of names today than there used to be, and a plethora of John Smiths out there! While the information on the internet is free, the family tree may be printed and that will cost you the paper and ink it takes.
Libraries are also a good place to look for family trees. My husband once found, in the Library of Congress, a chart showing his ancestors from the original immigrant, Jacobus Breckenridge, on down to his grandfather with various siblings and branches. Other than the cost of photocopying, he was able to obtain this family tree for free. Most public libraries have historical records of the area where they are located and published books about families who lived there. Occasionally they will place used books, or books that are less frequently used or for which they have multiple copies, on sale and you can pick up family tree information for next-to-free.
Whether or not you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you can access their online databases of family tree information for free. Simply go to www.familysearch.org and then you can choose to search for an ancestor by name or see whether they have a book with your family surname. If you search for an ancestor by name, you will also need some basic information about that person such as approximate birth, marriage or death year and the place where these events occurred. When you find your ancestor, and you are sure it is the correct person, you may be able to get their pedigree or immediate family (spouse and children). This depends entirely on whether the information was submitted as a pedigree or as an individual. The books they have at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, are usually on microfilm and you can order them for only the cost of shipping the film to your local family history center. Their collection of books is indexed so that it includes all surnames in the books, not just the dominant family surname.
In all of these cases, someone else went to the effort of researching and compiling family tree information for those who follow. If you find an error, please let the author know (and submit documentation showing why you think you are correct). Most groups or individuals who publish books will also publish updates and addendums. If you wish to submit updated information to FamilySearch, they are in the process of combining all possible duplicates in New FamilySearch, which is currently available only to members of the Church.
Whichever way you chose, family tree information can be found for free.
