Where do I start in finding out about my family ancestry?
I currently became curious about my family ancestry and really don’t know where to start. Can anyone point in the right direction in where to start? Where can I go? Online or off? Anything!
Tagged with: family ancestry • right direction
Filed under: Research
To start, you got to ask your parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, and basically anyone that is related to your family that is older than you. Ask your grandma/grandpa what they remember about growing up, their parents, their grandparents, any stories they remember hearing about them, and basically anything you want to know about your family. Ask them everything they may know about their ancestors (jobs, birth dates, birth places, marriages, religion, if they fought in war, interesting stories, personalites, where/when they died, how they died, burial places, family lore, etc.), That is the key…I messed up when I first doing genealogy because all I was trying to get were names and birth/marriage/death dates and place. It’s really much more interesting if you talk with your elders and really get to know about who your ancestors were. Make sure you record all the conversations/things that your family members tell you (I find it best to tape record because then you can always go back and listen to it…writing works too but I find that it is not as good). By taping what your grandparents/parents say, it gives you a chance to look back on it 50 years from now or even a chance for your grandchildren/great grandchildren to listen and hear about their ancestors. I found it fairly awkward talking to my grandma/grandpa about this kind of stuff at first but I got really used to it after a little while and I became very close to them. Get started as soon as you can, your parents, grandparents, and other older relatives don’t live or remember as well forever.
Make sure you also get any burial/birth/baptismal/marriage/death/newspaper/ or basically any kind of records that contain your ancestors from your older relatives. Get pictures of them and MAKE SURE YOU WRITE THEIR NAMES ON THE BACK. Ask your relatives if they know anyone else in the family that has been working on genealogy. I have talked with 4 or 5 of some of my grandparents’ cousins about genealogy. Once you think you talked to as much of your family members as you could, then you can go along getting records and tracing further back…you’ll even find a lot of interesting info that your grandparents probably don’t know about their parents. Just google/wikipedia genealogy…It’s almost impossible to explain all the processes of getting records for ancestors.
Talking with your relatives is the most important part of genealogy…remember that. And I know you may find it stupid because I know that I did when I first started, but I highly recommend tape recording all interviews that you have with your relatives. You think that you’ll remember everything they say but I have been doing genealogy for 2 years now and you WILL forget things… As time goes on, your genealogical work/interviews with your relatives become priceless.
ancestry.com i went there and found out a lot about my family and where I come from..
Good Luck to you!