An Adventure in Discovering Your Family Roots

Essentially Genealogy is the study of your family's history. The first place to start is with your family members. Particularly older family members, like grandparents, aunts and uncles, great aunt and uncles etc. Family reunions is a great time and place to ask relatives about your family history.

Things to Find out:

1. When and where they were born
2. When and where their parents were born
3. Ask about places they moved to in later years
4. What they did for a living
5. Ask if there is an old family bible with birth, marriage and death records.
6. Get them to tell you family stories.
7. See if you can get copies of old family photos they may have.

You can write these things down or get a small tape recorder and or a digital camcorder would be nice for recording your conversation with family members.

Don't have older relatives to ask? Then start with yourself and work backwords. There are a number of ways to gather the information you need to create your family tree. If you don't have info on your parents or grandparents:

---start with records such as your birth certificate which will (hopefully) give your parents full names and birthplaces. Older original birth certificates may also give the parents ages.

--- If you were adopted and are not sure of parents names you can post messages to genealogy exchange forums like genforum or Ancestry.com
message boards.Give your birthdate, gender, state and hospital from which you were adopted, your adopted name and if you know it, any info on birth parents. These messages can be posted under state and county of adoption, adopted surname or birth surname if known.

If you know your parents/grandparents names and they are deceased you can check the Social Security Death Index records. This index will give birthdate, death date, last residence if known, the Social Security # and the state the card was issued in. Social Security began in 1935 and the oldest death record I've found on the SS death Index was from 1952. From this site you can order a copy of the individuals application for a social security card-which should give you the date and residence at time of application and may (or may not) give the persons parents names and residence at the time of application. (my gr. fathers gave his fathers info, but not moms)

Any information gleaned from above sources should give you a time frame and location from which to begin going further back on your family tree.

There are many online resources for genealogical research. Message Boards and Census records are probably the most popular.

Message Boards

Again the message boards are for exchanging family history information. If you know where your family is from you can go to genforum or Ancestry.com
message boards and check all messages posted from that
---state and/or county and even refine your search by putting in your surname
---you can also research other countries besides the US
---or go directly to your surname's page and you can refine the search there by putting in a particular persons first name that you are looking for.

If you find something that seems to fit with your family line you can reply to that persons post. If you don't find information that matches yours, you can post your own family findings and hopefully get replies to your message from other people who are also researching your family line.

Census Records

The census records is one of the BEST sources for genealogy information, but there are a couple of things to remember about census records---

1. While the census in the US was taken every 10 years from 1790-forward, not all census records still exist for every census and for every state (some did not exist as "states" at the time of the earlier census's). This mostly applies to the ones prior to 1850 that were destroyed in various court house fires. Some of those census records were "reconstructed" though using tax records---but these will not be included in most online census websites since they are not the original official census records. You can find them in book form in many libraries.

Also the original 1890 census does not exist for ANY state---though some states tried to reconstruct it using tax records as well.

2. Census records have to be 72 years old before they are available to the general public. This is to protect people's information on there. Therefore the most current census available to the public is the 1930 census. The 1940 should become available in 2012.

3. Some of the older census records are VERY difficult or even impossible to read so the surname you are looking for maybe misspelled or even omitted in online or printed indexes.

4. Be sure when searching for your surname on census records to look for variations of spellings if you don't find what your looking for (ex. Smith, Schmit, Smyth, Dixon, Dickson) and even check misspellings (ie. F's can look like T's----a "fancy" S can look like an L) Often on older census the person giving the info couldn't read or write, so the census taker is spelling the name the way it sounds to him.

5. The census records up until 1840 only give the Head of Household by name. All other family members are given by gender and age groups. (ex. 1 male 0-10, 1 male 20-30, 2-females 0-10, 1 female 20-30-----on the census would look like this John Doe 1001-2001)

6. From 1850 forward the census records give all family member names (or initials), gender, age and place of birth. Some also give occupation, parents birthplace, value of personal property and/or real estate owned. This census is great for researching prior to 1850 as it lets you know where the Head of household and spouse were born and when (ex. John Doe age 37 b. Tn----you would know to look for the "Doe" family in Tennessee around 1820 with a son age 7.) With this census you also now have additional family names to look for in later census---bearing in mind that sometimes spouses or kids died-spouse may have remarried and additional children may have been born. Also sometimes ages from census to census vary depending on when the person was born and what month the census is taken.

Having said all that, there are several places you can check census records online. You can Search US Federal Census Records
on Ancestry. Once on that page you choose which census year you want to search, then add your ancestors name, state etc. It will give you a list if any matching your search is found---there is a fee on this site to view the actual original census records----BUT this is the only site I know of that has ALL the census records that are currently available for public viewing.

There are also a couple of free census sites where you can view the original census records but they currently do not have ALL of them transcribed. They are census online and usgenweb census project 1 or usgenweb census project 2

usgenweb also has links for genealogy research for all 50 states and their counties. Lots of great information to be found here.

Cindi's List (5***** site) has many, many great online genealogy resources such as obituaries, wills, ship passenger lists, military records, old newspapers, cemetery records, Native American resources, tax records and resources for genealogy in other countries other than US.

Bureau of Land Management has old land deed records and also land surveys (a type of map of the land location) for some states (are still adding these)

Gen UKI Got family ties in the UK or Ireland? This site has loads of information for you.

Access Genealogy Think you have Native American Heritage? Check this site out. It even includes the Dawes Rolls.

Start Your Family Tree




Online Family Trees

There are 2 great sites for creating your own online family tree FREE that I personally use. One of them is Ancestry Add information about you, then add family information such as spouses, children, birth, death and marriage records, as well as your sources of information, notes on each individual and even photos. As you gather more information it too can be added to your family tree. You can also create genealogy charts, posters and books from your information, which you can then purchase from Ancestry.

The other site I use for building my online family tree is My Trees. This site offers pretty much the same as the first one, except that it doesn't offer hints as to additional information that may apply to your family line. From this site you can get custom printed family trees that range in price from $16.95 to $34.95 depending on the design and number of family generations in the family tree.

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