Discover your Family Tree
Family History
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.
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.
