Tracing your History

There's lots of tools and information out there to help you trace your family background and your ancestry. I personally have signed up for Ancestry.com, and use it pretty extensively to track my ancestry. I've currently touched on 3,000 /- people and records and it's fascinating to me to work through putting the "puzzle" of finding your family through the past few months.

Using Ancestry.com can get tricky, and takes a little more work than what the commercials indicate. Yes, you do get the little "leaf" next to the names of those in your tree that have "hints", but unless those hints are official cited documentation, you are relying on the words and trees of other people who are also members of Ancestry.com. I've had mothers listed as sisters, one woman having children at age 80, etc. What you need to do is take it logically, and please rely on the census or military information that comes from cited sources. Take the other members' trees with a grain of salt, as they are sometimes not paying attention to dates, ages, etc.

Another good source of information is Genealogybank.com. This is a collection of archived, registered documentation as well as newspaper articles written throughout time. I have pulled articles from as early as 1785, and if nothing else, it provides some interesting (often comical) reading. The good news is, society hasn't truly changed a lot over time – it's just report more widely today. People are still doing the same crazy things today that they did in the 1800's!

There are lots of databases out there that you can search for information if you have the time and notion…  If not, let me do the research for you.  I'm very good at digging for accurate history, and can find the basic information so you can build your family tree.  

 

Contact me for more information.