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Always begin with what you
know and work backwards. Ask relatives
near and far for family information and stories.
Interview parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and
older cousins . . . while you still have a chance!
Be sure to take good notes, and if possible, make
recordings of your interviews. Also, search
around your home for pieces of family information,
such as family Bibles, photo albums,
scrapbooks, diaries, journals, yearbooks, employment
records, or anything that might provide additional
family information.
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Looking for
the goose who laid the golden eggs can
sometimes be a little like searching for
one's ancestors; one wonders if they ever
really existed . . .
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Visit the library or local
museum in the county where your family once lived
and join local historical and genealogical
societies. Your ancestors names may appear
in genealogical records indexes or may appear in
local history books. Or someone else may have
already researched your family line and left a copy
of their research with the library or historical
society. Join statewide and local historical
and/or genealogical societies for the counties or
communities your family once called home.
Subscribe to and read their publications and submit
genealogical queries of your own to their
newsletters.
Begin your search of primary
resources with U.S. Census indexes and records, as
well as other Federal resources, either in
print, online or on microfilm. Begin with the
1930 U.S. Census and work backwards. The U.S.
Census records themselves can help you to build a
skeleton of a family tree, and indexes of the U.S.
Census can help you trace the movements of family
members over the decades and generations. The
lesson here might be summed up with the phrase
"Think Federal to get local." Records
generated by the requirements of Federal government
agencies will help you to pinpoint the local
residences and locales that your ancestors knew so
well, and which you are trying to recover or
rediscover in your research. Remember, though,
that the information found in U.S. Census records is
only as good as the knowledge of the person who
answered the door that day when the census taker
dropped by for his visit.
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Threading a
needle is child's play compared to filling
in the blanks of some genealogies . . .
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Visit the courthouse in the
county where your family lived and check court
records, such as marriage records, deeds,
probate records (wills, administrations, sale bills,
inventories, etc.), guardianship records, voters
records, any kind of legal papers that would have
been filed in a courthouse by and for residents of
the county.
Obtain copies of vital
records which document a life. Of all
vital records, marriage records are perhaps the most
consistently maintained of vital records to be found
over the decades and centuries. Usually these
are maintained at the county level, but in recent
decades these have also been recorded at the state
level. Depending on the era, marriage records
may provide ages, birthplaces of bride and groom,
names of parents and their birthplaces, occupations,
number of prior marriages, witnesses, and much more
information. In some respects the vital data
to be gleaned from a marriage record is the closest
to first-hand reporting by our research subjects of
all three types of vital records. We were all
there for our births, but somebody else filled out
the form, and somebody else will fill out our death
certificates, too! Marriage records are often
filled out in person, the experience evidently not
being too unpleasant, as some have been known to
come back for seconds and thirds!
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Family
research can sometimes be a little like a
shell game; one has to consider many
possibilities and research them all before
finding the correct answer . . . .
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Obtain copies of birth and
death certificates for any family member of
interest, as well as other documentation of a death,
such as obituaries, death notices, and funeral
records. These will show death dates,
birth dates, names of parents, and other valuable
information, including the cause of death.
Remember, as always, that the family information
provided by these documents is only as good as the
knowledge of the informant who provided it, not
always a close relation to the deceased.
Obituaries can provide a lot of useful information,
similar to the vital information found on birth,
death, and marriage records, with additional
biographical information, depending on the
newspaper's policy at the time regarding obituaries
and the availability of that newspaper on microfilm
or in digital form to the researcher of today.
Visit the cemeteries where
your ancestors and other known family members are
buried. Take note of neighboring grave
markers and the markers which share surnames in
common with your research subjects, for they may be
members of your extended family tree.
Transcribe the engravings from the grave markers,
and take photographs of the markers.
Church records can
supplement or fill in for vital records of your
research subject(s). Baptismal, marriage,
membership, burial and other records may reveal as
much, if not more than official vital or cemetery
records in some cases.
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Looking for a
needle in a haystack? Family tradition
may be the source for placing certain events
in one location, when they really happened
elsewhere. Are you even looking in the
right haystack?
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Always take a broad interest
in the families of your ancestors siblings and the
in-laws of their married descendants. The
research of collateral lines will definitely take
more time and create more expense, but family
traditions, Bibles, photos, and other documents and
information may have followed the trail of one of
the lives of your aunts and uncles and their
descendants to a greater degree than in your own.
Once found, use the phone, the mails, or the
internet to get in touch with long-lost cousins.
Remember how you learned to
read; do you
remember what the first lesson was after you learned
your A-B-Cs in kindergarten or first grade?
Might it have been "Don't believe everything you
read!" Well, if not, now is the time to
remember it, for you will certainly learn the value
of the old saying as you take up the research of
your family tree. Remember that there was once
a time when no one thought that what they wrote
might be read a hundred years or so later.
Whether the story you find is hard to believe, or if
an entry in an index is not a perfect match for the
person's name you are looking for, keep and open
mind that mistakes might have been made in the
original record or by those who compiled the indexes
or transcribed the records.
Trust then verify:
Perhaps the most important guideline of all is to
never trust everything you read or hear. Just
because it is in print, doesn't mean it is true.
Just because Aunt Milly or Grandpa Jones says so,
doesn't mean it actually happened that way.
Whether out of respect for your elders or just
laziness on your own part, don't assume that the
first account you read or hear is the most
authoritative. Family traditions, Bibles,
photos, and other information may have followed the
trail of the lives of other family members or those
of other family lines to a greater degree than in
your own. By consulting others in the family
and researching further, whether just to fill in a
few more blanks or to verify a story, one will often
come across even more information to flesh out a
family history. In the end you may not know
any more than you did at first, but you can be more
certain of the facts than ever before.
The National Genealogical
Society has posted a set of
Genealogical Standards & Guidelines, which may
serve as a reference to follow in performing and
compiling your own research. They can also
serve as a template with which to measure the
research of others, whether you find it online, as
many do nowadays, or on the bookshelf of your state
or local library or historical society.
Never give up!
Like Robert Stack once said on Unsolved Mysteries,
there is always someone out there who knows the
answer.
And, lastly, no matter how much
you learn, you will always be a beginner,
researching a family tree just never ends!
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