Genealogy: Family Tree Discovery
Tracing back your lineage is a rewarding, time consuming and frustrating venture. Where to begin? Before you sign up for a genealogy site that charges a fee to access their records exhaust all the free info available online. An internet search of “free genealogy sites” will yield scads of material and keep you busy ‘til the wee hours of the morning. There are also state, county and city genealogy sites if you know where your ancestors lived. I’ve never had to pay to access their records.
When I started building a family tree, I found it was easiest to start with my grandparents and work backward and forward from there. Trace their brothers and sisters because they sometimes hold pieces to the puzzle you’re trying to complete. Please take my advice and keep well organized notes. My notes were not well kept which caused a lot of unnecessary frustration and extra work rechecking names and records. I now start a new page for each person and keep them in alphabetical order in a 3 ring binder.
Some sites have surname message boards. These are great places to not only find out more about your history, but you might find a cousin or two. You’ll forget all the long hours of chasing dead ends the first time you locate a living relative. Now you have someone to share your research with. I found a cousin who had diary entries of our family’s covered wagon migration from Ohio to Kansas. Very cool.
Don’t put too much emphasis on the spelling of names. Remember the census taker was writing this by hand and people are now having to read and interpret that faded handwriting to build the databases. I lost complete track of a person because the name was indexed as Layer rather than Sayre.
I’ve found so many interesting and sometimes heartbreaking facts about my family. As a kid I never understood my father’s seeming paranoia of us kids getting typhoid fever from playing in the dirty creek. It seemed, to us, like a sickness from the dark ages and not something we could get. I recently uncovered a newspaper story about his mother’s family being stricken with typhoid fever when she was just a girl. Now I understand.
