Search Ancestry

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.