What is genealogy?
Searching for your family genealogy means that you find out as much as you can about the ancestors who have gone before you. It is a hobby that can become all-encompassing as you begin to feel closer to those family members, using the data trail they’ve left behind in records, journals, and sometimes even photographs. Many amateur researchers have fallen in love with learning how to delve into family records and learn all they can about their relatives. In previous eras family genealogy only developed if you were lucky enough to have a pedigree chart recorded in an old family Bible. Today, however, advances in Internet technology have helped genealogy records grow by leaps and bounds. Now you can link up with others who may have already researched parts of your family tree and compare or share information.
Why study genealogy?
Learning about those who paved the way for you to exist today can teach you more about what you have come from and who you have the potential to become. By learning about your ancestors, you can not only strengthen family ties across generations but you can also learn about your medical inheritance, personalize history and geography, and learn research techniques. Genealogy creates a legacy for your descendents. Plus, it’s fun! Along the way to finding information you get to play detective, but this time the missing people, clues, and mysterious characters are real and all involve you.
Starting your family history
The best way to start your own family genealogy is to develop your own pedigree chart. Start small, with your own immediate family, including your parents, and continue back to your grandparents. Be sure to include birth and death dates, and any other important information like wedding dates, births of children, or baptism dates. Examine any useful documents in your own home, like family Bibles, funeral programs, obituaries, family registers, and ancestral tablets. By starting small you will be able to make sure you have all the information you need and you can fill in any holes you may notice.
How do you do it?
Once you start digging for information, you will need to look in new places. Talk to relatives and see if they have any new data you can use. Next you can see if others have done some of the work for the people you are looking for. Websites offer many tools to help you create your own family genealogy. You can download free software, family tree charts, or diagrams and templates to help you organize your information. They feature links to sites like the U.S. Census Records, which offer data on families all the way back to 1790 and up through 1930. Information from immigration records, historic newspapers, and birth, marriage, and death records are all great places to start looking for information on your family members.
So, I’ve made a pedigree chart—now what?
Once you have the basic information, choose one or two ancestors you have a deeper interest in and research their lives specifically. Look for journals they’ve kept, photographs they had, items that belonged to them, stories they told. Perhaps you will find enough information to write a biography on them that can be passed down to your posterity to teach them about the kind of people they came from.
By Lyndsey Payzant