Discover Your Family

It’s unique and you don’t need any special training to learn it.

Everyone has an important history that makes them who they are. Your history and the history of your family are unique. You will treasure it and share it with others. But first you must begin to find it and you can. Anyone can research family history. If you can write a letter, talk on the telephone, send a text message then you can do it. No special skill or degree is needed.

There is a difference between genealogy and family history. When you are doing genealogy, you are developing a record of the names of people from whom you are descended. Family history, on the other hand, is finding out the stories of the lives of those people. It is discovering the lore that has been passed down from generation to generation, the photos and quilts, the diaries, the letters that tell your family’s story.

Families are unique. Families come in many shapes and sizes. Families could be your blood relatives or the people who raised you. In this world of adoption, foster care or extramarital affairs, you are part of the family that raised you, they influenced your behaviors and made the person who you became. Thus, if you are adopted, you are still connected to your non-blood relatives; you share stories, life experiences, heartbreak and triumphs. Therefore, as an adopted individual, or someone who just found out that their dad is not their bio-dad, (or some other similar situation); you have so much more family than most of us. Don’t be afraid to embrace all the branches of your tree, both blood and non-blood.

Once you begin your search, talking to relatives, looking up birth records, searching attics and family bibles, it is essential to keep track of the information you discover in a well-organized way. Keeping good records from the start will save you time and frustration later. Please don’t let the word organize scare you off. The most common tools for organizing information are the pedigree or ancestor chart and the family group record or sheets. Successful family historians and genealogist use these as guides for what they know and what they want to learn. From the start, establish a system for using these records, whether it’s in a loose-leaf notebook, a filing cabinet, on a computer or on the internet.

Please don’t try to create hand-made forms for recording your family, you might understand them, however, no one else might. Plus, why re-invent the wheel? There are so many variations found on-line for you to download and print out for free. My advice, stick to the same form for all your pedigree or ancestor charts and one form for all your family group sheets. It will be easier for you to quickly find information, since you will always look in the same place.

Only want to use do it on the computer, that is fine too. First decide if you want to use a computer based software package or a web-based application. They each have their own pros and cons. Some computer based software packages offer free trial versions and remember that all web-based applications are not created equal. Some are “group” or a “collaborate” tree which means you enter the living people, whom only you can see, or change and then once you enter your deceased relatives, you will connect with people who already have done some research. This is where you all can change or delete these people. Computer based software packages reside on your desktop or laptop (there are even a few available for tablets) and only you can see, change or delete people. 

The thing to remember is whatever option you choose, make sure you can save a copy of your tree in Gedcom format. Gedcom is a way that one genealogy package can talk to another genealogy package. Thus you could enter all our information on a computer based software package and then upload a Gedcom of your tree to a web-based application. Or download your web-based application and upload to a different web-based application. The rule here is, pick only one place where you key in all your information and then upload to the other sites. Anyway, software alone could be an entire subject in its own right. This is all I am going to say about it.

A Pedigree or ancestor chart will list all your direct ancestors, starting with yourself, then your parents, your grandparents and great grandparents, etc. This is the road map to your family. While a Family group record or sheet is where you record each family unit. For example, your parents and all their children, note if either or both of your parents have had children with a different spouse, partner, etc.… you would use a different family group sheet to record that information.

A third tool in your research that you could employ is a research log where you keep track of the sources you have used to document your family history and genealogy. It is important to note, when, where or from whom information was found. This will help you avoid visiting a source twice and allows you to go back and review what you may have already found. Sometimes it is good to list places you searched and found nothing. This way, you won’t keep going back to the same place and waste valuable time. For example, if you checked a certain book for one surname, that surname won’t magically appear again in that book if you were to check that book again a year later. However, if you check a website database for information, that may have new information in a year, if they add to their databases.

Don’t only rely only on other people’s trees or research. Use their research as clues that you verify and make sure you come to the same conclusions. It is not uncommon to find people who accidently start using records for someone with the same name, and before you know it, they are researching the other’s person’s family. I find that miss information seems to spread like wildfire while correct information is well hidden and needs to be dug up.

Not everything is found online. I still visit many courthouses, cemeteries and local libraries to view newspapers via microfilm or their book collections that might not be digitized yet.

Don’t expect someone to just give you all their research. People are willing to share, however you need to share what you know. You might think you don’t know anything, however, how about you, your siblings and their families, your parents and their siblings and families. Many of the closer generations to you might be unknown to the person who has research backed to your 5^th great grandparents.

If there is anything you want to learn more about genealogy, you most likely will find help on various subjects via the internet. You might find a blog, a webinar, a YouTube video and more. Start with yourself, and work back one generation at a time. Being careful to record everything you find or could know about that generation before going back to the next generation. Plus, don’t forget to have fun and my final warning… Genealogy is addictive and there is no known cure.