Researching Your Genealogy: Start with Living house Members

A whole of resources exist which can help you investigate your house heritage. If you're lucky, one of the best resources is close at hand: your own family. Stories passed down from generation to generation contain nuggets of information that can help you begin your search. Names of your parents and grandparents, and their parents, can take you back three or four generations. Don't ignore spouses of house relatives; not only do their personal stories add to the flavor of house history, sometimes the spouse of a house member - particularly the wife of a male relative - knows more about your family's history than the relative does.

Interview your house members to see what they know about house history. The older members in single may have knowledge of your house tree for generations, as well as what these ancestors did for a living, where they lived, when and how they died, and personal stories they're more than willing to hand down to another generation. If you have birth or death certificates among house records, you're in luck; birth certificates will contain a birth date, name of parents, and location of birth. The place of birth in single will give you a clue as to where to look for added information.

Be aware that house recollections can be wrong. A merge personal experiences: My middle name is May, which was given to me in honor of my father's aunt who raised him. My parents ended up being upset when they found out later that my aunt's name wasn't May, it was precisely Mary. But it doesn't stop there: while I was researching my aunt's death I came across her obituary in the local newspaper, and it turns out her name wasn't May or Mary - it was Ruth!

Meanwhile, on my mother's side of the family, it was well known that her grandfather's name was Francis Isaac Barrott, that he had lived and died in Worcester, Massachusetts, and that he had precisely worked as a maintenance man at City Hall. I contacted the records division of the city of Worcester seeing for any records of Francis Isaac Barrott, and found nothing. Later, I obtained my mother's father's death certificate (he had died at the relatively young age of 37) and discovered that his father had signed his own son's death certificate - as "Frank R. Barrott".

Once you've gleaned as much as you can from living relatives, it's time to access group records. Birth and death records, deeds, and troops records are among those available for research, as are U.S. Census records, from the years 1790 up to 1930 (by law, census records cannot be released to the group for 75 years). When searching census records, start with the newest census and move backward; this way you may be able to track the changes in house circumstances back through the years.

Searching group records has come to be a lot easier since the introduction of the Internet. A beloved software program available online, Ancestry.com, allows you to build your house tree and quest U.S. Census databases and other group records.

A lot of books are available to help you on your house search. One of the best is Genealogy 101: How to Trace Your Family's History and Heritage, by Barbara Renick in connection with the National Genealogical community (Rutledge Hill Press, 2003). Renick offers an organized coming to genealogical investigate that will save you a lot of false starts.

If you've been thinking for a while about starting a serious quest into your family's background, don't put it off. Your best resource, your older house members, is a finite resource. Once they pass on, their knowledge is gone forever.

linked here Researching Your Genealogy: Start with Living house Members linked here