Beginning the journey exploring your family history
History is all around us. Every place. Every city. Each town. Community. House. Street. Lake. The remnants of the past linger in the present. The people buried in a cemetery deep in the woods off a dirt road represent members of a once thriving community. Fossils of seashells buried in the dirt of an arid desert tell tales of an ancient river rich with marine life. Our families have a past and a story of how they came to be. As an avid genealogist who has been researching my family history for over 20 years, I’ll give you some tips on how to get started researching your genealogy if you’re curious and don’t know where to begin.
The first thing I recommend people do is begin with yourself . Pick your brain and see how much you know about your parents, grandparents and beyond. If you have access to a computer, download a pedigree chart. A pedigree chart is a way of organizing your thoughts to see what you know and don’t know about your family. The most important information you need on your family are dates of birth, death and the places they lived. If there is information you don’t know, gather oral histories from family members from different generations if you can. That includes parents, grandparents, uncles/aunts and other cousins. Don’t just focus on dates. Gather stories about their lives to help flesh out your family story since exploring genealogy is more than recording a long succession of births, deaths and marriages. It’s the history of your family. I also tell people that there are more than one way to make a family since how origins are complex and diverse. If you were adopted and want to only research the genealogy of your adopted parents, you can do that. If you want to explore the roots of a beloved stepmother or stepfather who reared you from infancy, explore away. A family is more than biology. Not everyone comes from a nuclear family
Once you have all the information you gathered from talking to your family, the next step is to begin your journey researching online. I recommend the websites Ancestry.com, Myheritage and Familysearch.org to get you started. All these websites contain millions of public records such as census enumerations, death indexes, marriage certificates, wills, land deeds and a wide variety of historical documents that mention your ancestors. If you don’t have the funds to subscribe to Ancestry.com or MyHeritage, check your local public libraries to see if they have free subscriptions in their databases you can access with a library card. Familysearch.org is a free website you can use at home once you create a free account. They are associated with the Church of Latter day saints and is known for containing the world’s largest repository of genealogical information.
Beginning your family history with what you know helps you uncover the stories that are unknown and forgotten. It a journey self-discovery that is unique is each person. You never what you may find.
Happy hunting!
