Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Getting Started

Before you start a formal search:

Before you start writing letters, searching on the web or looking through archives and libraries, you should search your own family records. Ask your parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins what they know. Interesting facts and anecdotes might come out of such conversations. You will learn names you might not have been aware of and dates and locations might emerge. You might find your aunt clearing up some questions that you have about an uncle or cousin and how they fit into the tree. Names pop up at times like that, that are not on ordinary lists. For instance, if your grandparents had a child who died in infancy, they may never be mentioned in casual conversation. So, if you had found a family listing that sounded right but had one too many names, your aunt would know that it is the right family and that little Ella belongs on your family tree after all.

You never know where these conversations will take you. Many times names, especially of locations, get garbled after a hundred years or so. You are told Pine Mountain by one person, Mountain Pine by another or Pine Tree Hill by another. You might find out, after some study, that it was, in reality, Pine Forest Township and that it no longer exists. It is now called something all together different, having been incorporated into a city. You would have been looking for records in the wrong place, had not a cousin known that.

Often the older members of a family knew many of the family that has passed on. They can tell you the ages of siblings, who they married and what children they had. All of these conversations can save you a lot of time and make your search much easier. So conversations with older family members are critical.

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