Tracing your family history is a rewarding experience. To realize where your family came from, and where they have been somehow makes you feel like you have learned a little more about yourself. In fact, for many people genealogy has become an obsession. Thanks to the Internet, the tedious task of having to travel to public libraries and houses of records to find the information you need is virtually unnecessary.
A pedigree chart is a numbered chart that documents your family history. Anyone who has seen a family tree knows what a pedigree chart is. On these charts, the first person, numbered one, is either you or your child (it’s your child if you wish to include yours and your spouse’s family in the chart). As the family name usually carries with the father, the father’s name, or the name of the first person on the chart, runs along the top of the chart. If you are developing a chart and you wish to include both the lineage of you and your spouse, make a child the first person on the chart.
Once the father of the first person on the chart is listed, then the grandfathers, great grandfathers, and multiple great grandfathers are all listed. As you include more generations on your chart, the more names you will have to include. The number of people involved grows exponentially as you increase the number of generations. The enormous amount of people that could end up being included on a pedigree chart is the reason why so many genealogists spend so much time on their family histories.
One way that many Americans make their pedigree charts is by tracing their family history to the point at which their family first came to America. Not only is the point of immigration a good starting point for a family tree, it is also often the point at which good records are most likely to be available. While families of new immigrants may have better access to family records from the old country, many longer-established American families will have to find foreign records from the 17 th and 18 th centuries in order to document their family history beyond American shores.
Today, the Internet is an invaluable resource for amateur and professional genealogists alike. Websites such as genealogy.com and heritagequest.com offer the searcher access to millions of names included in census records, birth and death records, and the like from around the country. These websites also offer helpful tools such as ready-made pedigree chart templates, in which the genealogist can insert his or her findings. Most of these sites do charge a small fee for the use of their site.
Most of these sites only offer census style information on ancestors, but you may be lucky enough to find some extra information. While it is nice to know the names of your ancestors, the real reason most genealogists complete family trees is so they can find out what their ancestors were like. If you are compiling a genealogical chart with your pedigree, think of the ancestor names as just a starting point. Once you know the names, you can begin the real work: finding out what these people did, where they lived, and whether you may be entitled to some inheritance. You never know, you may find that you are related to kings, queens, or baseball stars.
By Alex Turman