Discover your Family Tree
Posts tagged OneGreatFamily
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 Tree Database
Apr 13th
A family tree database is any collection of information for use in compiling one’s family tree. The word data implies some sort of empirical evidence. In the case of family trees, this evidence usually involves documentation of life events such as births or christenings, marriages, and deaths or burials. These events usually have been recorded by churches or governments at various levels, such as city, county, state or national. Other sources that serve as databases for family trees are personal recordings such as in Family Bibles, journals, diaries or letters. Military records could also be considered a family tree database, as could hospital records, land records, probates, and tax records.
Another family tree database is one we often start with – censuses. Censuses were originally taken for military purposes. In the Old Testament, we read of the numbers of males belonging to each tribe, so that they had a count of how many men they could put into battle if need be. It is interesting to note that they counted only the males, a detail which the early census takers in the United States followed. Between 1790 and 1850, censuses asked only the name of the head of household, numbers of males and females between certain ages, and whether they were bond or free. The further along we got, the more information they asked for until people felt that the government was getting quite intrusive. As this is 2010, we completed a census this year and, while the scare tactics were certainly plentiful about the privacy issues of the census forms, the form I received required only very basic information about who lived at our address. While, as an individual I appreciate my privacy, as a family historian I understand the value of certain questions on census forms. I think that family history researchers a hundred years from now are going to be quite disappointed in the 2010 census!
Censuses are appealing as a family tree database because they do include the whole family, or at least as much of it as was present at a particular address on a certain night. National online indexes make it easy to locate families and to find out a lot about people at a glance. Many web sites (usually subscription) offer censuses for various countries. Often subscription sites are available for free at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a few affiliated Family History Centers throughout the world. They are also available on microfilm at most locations.
Most government agencies make their family tree databases available to the public, usually for a fee. Indexes may be free but the actual certificates usually come with a price tag, whether it be in the form of buying the certificate from the relevant agency or subscribing to a family history web site such as Ancestry and its affiliates. Ancestry, Footnote and others have paid to use the censuses and birth, marriage and death certificates. They also pay staff to index the material so it is easier for you to locate what you are looking for. You can still order certificates from governments but it takes time and you might not get the right one. It is certainly worth-while, if you are a serious researcher, to pay the subscription cost but make sure the site you subscribe to carries the material you are likely to need. Try their free trial first.
If churches put cemetery or baptismal, marriage and burial records online, they do not usually charge. They might, however, request a donation if you write to them for particular information. Remember that they have a staff to employ, photocopy expenses and mailing expenses.
Other family tree databases can be found in homes. We mentioned Family Bibles, letters, journals etc but they could also include military records, wills, photos, newspaper clippings of weddings and funerals, and family histories compiled by someone else. And some web sites, like OneGreatFamily, encourage others to submit family trees, hopefully with documentation. Wherever you look, you will find databases that are useful in researching your family tree.
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.
Genealogy Site
Jan 29th
There are a ton of genealogy sites on the internet these days, since researching genealogy has been one of the top two hobbies, along with gardening, for decades. Genealogy sites usually come in two varieties – free, which are usually compiled sources, and subscription, which tend to offer copies of original sources. I’m not saying that you may not have to pay for compiled information or that you cannot get an original document unless you pay for it, but generally that is the case.
One genealogy site which offers compiled information for a fee is OneGreatFamily. Members download their family history onto the site so that others can share their research. Every effort is being made to make sure dates and places are correct and complete. OneGreatFamily offers other services too but their main emphasis is on sharing family lines with other subscribers. Finding the work that other people have done avoids repetition of a great deal of work.
A cross-over in the genres of genealogy sites is www.familysearch.org. This is a free site and offers not only research that other people have done and access to indexes to such things as the Social Security Death Index and some select censuses, but also their library holdings of original documents. The “original document” aspect of this genealogy site comes with the millions of records they have microfilmed and make available free of charge (except shipping and handling) to the public. They have microfilmed all sorts of records pertaining to genealogical research from countries across the globe.
Fold3.com is a subscription site that specializes in original documents but also offers a free side to the genealogy site. Ancestry.com and its affiliates is another such web site. For a fee you can view images of original documents but you can also share your story or stories for free. Sharing is a great way to get past that sticking point where you just have not been able to find the records necessary to further your research. By posting a question or writing an article to put on their sites, you may get responses from those who have overcome the problem you now face or who have more information than you do.
Public libraries and some university libraries have free web sites that let you know what their genealogical holdings are. The L. Tom Perry Special Collections section of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University lets you see exactly what they have, and which ones have been digitized and are available online. You can also see what records, usually on microfilm, the BYU Family History Center currently has. Since they are adding microfilm almost every month, it pays to look for a particular item later if you did not find it the first time. Both these genealogy sites can be accessed by going to www.byu.edu.
I could list hundreds of genealogy sites that you could use but you can see the list yourself by typing “genealogy” into any search engine. As you browse through them, you will find that some are better than others and some might not meet your research needs at all.
Free Genealogy
Jan 17th
Whether you are beginning to trace your genealogy or are an expert at it, you may be daunted by the occasional expense involved in getting information about family members. There is, however, some help in the guise of free genealogy web sites and other sources which cost little if anything.
If you type “free genealogy” into a search engine such as Google or Ask, you will find a lot of internet sites that advertise free genealogy. Some of these are www.publicdomaingenealogy.com, www.accessgenealogy.com, www.familysearch.org, www.olivetreegenealogy.com, www.kindredtrails.com and www.ancestralfindings.com. These are just a few that came to the top of the list when I searched for “free genealogy”. I went through the process of registering for www.publicdomaingenealogy.com as an example and they didn’t want my credit card number or anything personal other than my name, address and email address. Their Terms and Agreements also looked non-intrusive. However, when I accessed the email they said they would send to verify my email address, it came up with “MyPoints, smartest shopping program.” So I am not going to continue because I do not want my security to be compromised. This may be the case with some of the other sites that offer free genealogy – I just don’t have time to try them all. I did try Olive Tree Genealogy and Kindred Trails in the past with no problems.
One very secure site which gives you free genealogy and does not ask all sorts of compromising personal questions is www.familysearch.org. This site is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. They offer information gathered and submitted by many other people from around the world whether they are members of the Church or not, free genealogy searches on the Social Security Death Index and some census indexes, and access to their library catalog of holdings of genealogical records on microfilm, including books about surnames, events and places. This collection of books includes historical books held by the Harold B Lee Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. They also offer articles about genealogy and research guidance to assist you with your genealogy. You can print most of their material and can order their microfilm through you local family history center. One of the links under Library will give you the address, phone number and hours of your nearest family history center.
Other free sources for your genealogy include public libraries, cemeteries, web sites set up by genealogical societies and historical societies, and don’t forget the free trials that many subscription sites offer. To get the free trial however, you will usually need to give them you credit card number, which puts a lot of people off. If you subscribe for a free trial from such sites as www.ancestry.com or www.fold3.com, make sure you note when you signed up for the free trial and when you will need to call to cancel if you decide not to subscribe. Make sure you have their customer service number on hand and be prepared to listen to their sales pitch. If the site does not have the records you are looking for, do not subscribe hoping that someday they might!
