There are certain steps you need to take when researching your family history. It will help you if you make lists of different things you need to do, so that you can keep everything straight. You will need to interview family members, review family, church and courthouse records, network with other people and keep detailed notes of the information you find.
The first step is interviewing family members. You don’t want to limit this just to the older people in your family, but to everyone you can think of. The reason for this is that you might have someone that is your age or younger who have talked to their parents or grandparents and received stories that other people in the family didn’t have access or knowledge of. Make a list of the people you can interview, remember that it works best to go visit the people in your family to interview them. If you are sitting in front of them talking you are more likely to find out more information that if you do it over the phone or through email, because they are interacting with you and it will help them remember more information. Make a list of the questions you want to ask before you go visit them and it might help if you take a tape recorder so that you can play back the information and make sure you didn’t miss anything. You will want to talk to the person before you go visit them, to make sure they want to talk to you and that they have time. It will also help you to find out if they have pictures of people that you can make a copy of because then you have a pictorial history of your family, even if the relative is still alive and there are quite a few pictures of this individual, that might not always be the case.
After you have interviewed all of the family members you can think of, the next step is to take the information you have gathered and organize it. This is when it is helpful to have a genealogy software program but if you don’t, you can use family group sheets to keep everything straight. Next make a list of the people you need more information on and go to the courthouse and review the information they have on births, deaths and marriages. Some of the information might be found in the church records and some might be found in old family bibles. The family bibles can be found out about when you interview your family members. They will either have the bible themselves or know you is the keeper of the family bible. Researching the courthouse and church records is not a quick task. It could take you years to research all of the information you have received, but perseverance is crucial when you are researching your family history. Some courthouses won’t have any records because of different reasons, whether there was a fire or flood or information was just lost. The same is true with churches, not all of the churches that existed 100 years ago are still in existence today and their records have been lost. Thankfully, much information has become accessible online and it will make your research easier, but you will still hit roadblocks.
The next step for researching your family history is through networking. Many people do not know what this means. This is when you access different newsgroups, forums and websites for information on your family. You can post information on all of these venues to find out if someone else has information you are looking for, but it is important to remember that the information you receive from them is not always accurate. That is why it is important to take the information you receive from other people and verify it through other avenues, i.e. courthouse records, church records, marriage certificates and birth and death certificates. If you follow these steps it will help you make sure your information is as accurate as you can make it.
The most important part of family history research is to keep detailed notes of what you have done, where you have found the information and who you have received information from. This will help you keep the information as accurate as possible without worrying about looking for the wrong individual in your family history. A word of warning, you will receive quite a bit of information and if you don’t keep it organized you could very easily become lost and discouraged. You will also hit bumps in the road where you feel like you aren’t making any progress, but work through these times or set it aside for a little while and eventually you will find the information you are looking for. Researching your family history is a rewarding and fun endeavor that you can pass on to future generations. You will meet family you never knew you had and find interesting twist and turns along the way. So have fun and enjoy the journey into your own personal history.
Showing posts with label family history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family history. Show all posts
Friday, August 3, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
It's All in a Name...
Are you proud of your heritage? Do you feel you need to live a life with honor because you are a…? You want your family name to mean something. It is special to you so you want it to be special to others like Ford, Edison, Einstein, and Mozart. What many people don’t know is that when they came to the United States their name was changed, whether it was because the custom agent couldn’t spell the name or your ancestor wanted to Americanize their name, but in some way or other your family name could have been changed.
So what does this mean to you as you research your family history? So far for my family, I have run across three names that have been changed and one of them was a first name. Finding information is rarely easy and when we have ancestors that immigrate to other countries it makes it more difficult. So just because a surname is spelled different than the one you are researching, don’t close the door. You just might find the missing ancestor you were looking for and he is under a different rock than you thought.
As people change their names today, it will be confusing for future generations to find their ancestors also. It used to be families normally stayed near one another so if you found two people with the same last name in a town they were normally related. But now with so many people in the world and families so far spread out it will be extremely difficult for future genealogist to find their history. At one point my parents, who have eight children, had 3 daughters and 2 sons living in other states.
So just remember when you are looking for that elusive ancestor, try to phonetically change the spelling and see if you find the person you are looking for. You just might get lucky and open up a whole new world.
So what does this mean to you as you research your family history? So far for my family, I have run across three names that have been changed and one of them was a first name. Finding information is rarely easy and when we have ancestors that immigrate to other countries it makes it more difficult. So just because a surname is spelled different than the one you are researching, don’t close the door. You just might find the missing ancestor you were looking for and he is under a different rock than you thought.
As people change their names today, it will be confusing for future generations to find their ancestors also. It used to be families normally stayed near one another so if you found two people with the same last name in a town they were normally related. But now with so many people in the world and families so far spread out it will be extremely difficult for future genealogist to find their history. At one point my parents, who have eight children, had 3 daughters and 2 sons living in other states.
So just remember when you are looking for that elusive ancestor, try to phonetically change the spelling and see if you find the person you are looking for. You just might get lucky and open up a whole new world.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Memory Lane
When you are thinking of genealogy and family it is easy to get stuck with the facts, births, deaths, marriages and children, but it is important to look deeper. You need to look into the memories that people have. It will help your family story become more real, instead of just being a book of dry facts. People will enjoy reading your family history and not just the basic facts that most people have in the books they create about their families.
If you want to make your family history come alive you need to interview people in your family and find out their life story. You can talk to them about their favorite memories, places where they lived and friend they had. You can also find out from them memories they have of other people in the family whether they are alive or dead. This will help your story become more alive, it will make a rich and detailed story instead of a dry and boring history, just stating the facts.
The more you talk to people in your family the more information you will find out. You can talk to the same person many times and get different stories each time. It is mindful to realize that some of the stories will be repeated but if you are patient and wait you will find out new information and sometimes there will be information in the stories that will help you trace your history.
One of my favorite stories is about my grandfather. He was a great man, a farmer who raised his children after his wife died in a time when it wasn’t done. When he was younger he worked at a paint factory and loved it. He had the eye for mixing the right colors together and not get mud. But over time from the fumes in the plant and overuse, he developed colored blindness. This meant he had to leave a job he loved, but did he let it get him down, no. He was a man who took care of his family any way he had to and instead of getting discouraged he went out and bought some land and started farming like his family had done for centuries. This is the kind of stories you are looking for. Something that will make your history full and intriguing, a wealth of information future generations will enjoy reading about because they never knew the man or woman in your story.
If you want to make your family history come alive you need to interview people in your family and find out their life story. You can talk to them about their favorite memories, places where they lived and friend they had. You can also find out from them memories they have of other people in the family whether they are alive or dead. This will help your story become more alive, it will make a rich and detailed story instead of a dry and boring history, just stating the facts.
The more you talk to people in your family the more information you will find out. You can talk to the same person many times and get different stories each time. It is mindful to realize that some of the stories will be repeated but if you are patient and wait you will find out new information and sometimes there will be information in the stories that will help you trace your history.
One of my favorite stories is about my grandfather. He was a great man, a farmer who raised his children after his wife died in a time when it wasn’t done. When he was younger he worked at a paint factory and loved it. He had the eye for mixing the right colors together and not get mud. But over time from the fumes in the plant and overuse, he developed colored blindness. This meant he had to leave a job he loved, but did he let it get him down, no. He was a man who took care of his family any way he had to and instead of getting discouraged he went out and bought some land and started farming like his family had done for centuries. This is the kind of stories you are looking for. Something that will make your history full and intriguing, a wealth of information future generations will enjoy reading about because they never knew the man or woman in your story.
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