Position:Home>History> Trying to find out about my ancestors?

I got interested in genealogy after my son was born, but by then everyone from the older generations was gone!. You are wise to begin while they are still with you!. Get all the info from your relatives that they can give you!. WRITE IT DOWN!!. You may find it helpful to use charts - there are family tree charts (often called pedigree charts), and family group charts!. As you get further back, people tended to have large families, and you can record all the children on the family group chart, while a pedigree chart only has a place for your direct ancestors!.

An alternative to paper charts is genealogy software!. There are some good ones out there, but the one I have always used is free, from the Mormon Church!. Mormons have to do their genealogy, far enough back to tie it into information that their church already has on record - its a religious requirement!. Every Mormon Church has a genealogy library, and they can share records from the central repository in Utah, get microfilms, etc!. They have a hollowed out mountain full of the largest collection of genealogical information ever assembled, in Utah, and I understand theyre keeping up with every birth and death on the planet, and trying to sort out all earlier generations too!. You dont have to be a Mormon to use their library, but based on my experiences at our local "Latter Day Saints" Church, they can be a bit snooty, and give a preference to their church members!. But the free software is as good as anything you can go buy, and once you get far enough into it, you can access records in Utah rather than go through your local LDS Church!. The software is called "Personal Ancestral File":

http://www!.familysearch!.org/eng/default!.!.!.!.

Here's a link to where you can search the Mormon records online (remember, the people youre searching for dont have to have been Mormons - they record ALL data on everybody):

http://www!.familysearch!.org/eng/default!.!.!.!.

One good way to get a start, after youve quizzed your old relatives, is to obtain death certificates!. If your family has been in the same place for generations this is easy!. Every death, in every county, gets a death certificate, and it gets registered (and there's a copy) at the courthouse!. There's a place for the names of the dead person's parent's, and often, where they were from!. So you go find the death certificates of the people that were the furthest back anybody can remember, and then you can know who the parents were!. If youre lucky, those newly discovered parents also lived long enough that there's a death certificate for them too, and you can learn the next generation!. Theyve only been recording these death certificates for about one hundred years, but anybody that died in the 1920s was probably born way back in the 1800s!.

Then there's census records!. They keep them secret for 75 years, so theyve recently released the 1930 census!. From 1850 on up, they list the names of all people living in every household!. So you know who they were, from the death certificates - now you find them when they were kids still living at home, and you find out who the parents were that way!. A good public library has these on microfilm!.

Before you try all this you might want to search on the GenForum - Ive had some really good luck there, and found out generations worth of stuff that had me stumped:

http://genforum!.genealogy!.com/

There's also something called the GenWeb online - this one works by state and county, instead of by last names:

http://usgenweb!.org/

There are commercial sites that charge a fee to use them, like ancestry!.com!. Ive had better luck, by far, at the two free ones above, but here's a few:

http://www!.familyhistory!.com/
http://www!.ancestry!.com/

When you get far enough back to find the people who immigrated to America, it gets more complicated, but if you get that far youll have an idea then how to proceed!.

You can email me if you want and Ill try to help!. Lots of people doing genealogy are very helpful!.

Best of luck in your quest!Www@QuestionHome@Com

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The easy way to know is to ask your grandparents, if they are alive, where you were originated, your roots, what country!. Or ask your parents, uncles or aunts, they can probably give you an idea!. Good luck!Www@QuestionHome@Com

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