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Posts tagged 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.
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!
