Learning about your progenitors can be a be an extremely rewarding experience. There is something special and empowering about discovering the struggles and victories of your ancestors. The road to learning who your ancestors are, though, can be a bumpy one fraught with disappointment and difficulty. This was my experience as I started searching for more information about my ancestors, but I can assure you that the difficulty in the search can make the finding all the sweeter. Below I am outlining some tips and tricks that I have obtained either by my own experience or have received pro bono from professional genealogists.
Start With What You Know
Considering the number of people that are related to you even that just lived in the last 50-100 years can be quite overwhelming. I would wager that the imagined enormity of that which you don’t know is enough to convince a lot of people to leave Family History Discovery to other people. My first advice is to not let this discourage you, and to just start organizing what you know. Don’t worry about indirect relatives at first. Just stick to your parents, then moving on to their parents and so on. You might even write down a list of people that you suspect you are related to, even if you don’t know how you are related to them. Everyone has that Aunt or Uncle that they have seen at family gatherings, but you just don’t know how they are related to you. Taking the time to at least write out on paper the things you already know is a great way to give yourself direction and turn that whale into at least the first bite sized pieces that you can swallow.
Enlist The Help Of A Computer
This may seem like a shameless plug, because I am currently employed by Ancestry.com, but as I used their software to organize my family tree and search for more relatives I found it to be an invaluable tool. Software to organize your tree on a site like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org can be helpful in at least two ways. First of all is that it can give you an organized way to write down the information you know about your relatives. Second, and I believe most useful, these programs will take the information that you put into your tree and try to use it to help you find records from public collections to help you locate more relatives that you didn’t know about. The two example programs that I have listed here are good at taking loose information and using it to build a search. As an example, if you don’t know the precise date of birth of one of your relatives, you can put in a rough guess and that might just be enough to help the search engine find a census record of your relative.
Talk To Your Living Family Members
Some of the most rewarding times of my family history research have been when I sent an email to a relative to either share what I had found or to solicit help when I had run into a dead end. Sitting on a couch near your grandparents after a good meal can be a great time to get a life story. I heard some amazing stories from my grandfather doing just this. Fortunately I had my laptop and smartphone with me so that I could record as much as possible. Hearing stories about people that might otherwise just be names on a paper make family history work so much more interesting, e.g. finding out that your great aunt was famous for hip shot accuracy in the FBI is a rare treat. It also helps to have specific questions in mind to get people talking. My experience has left me always amazed at how much I have in common with my ancestors. I had another experience where I was trying to find information about my 2x-great grandfather who had immigrated to the U.S. at a very young age from England. After spending hours scouring public record collections, I sent an email to a few of my living relatives sharing what I had found. That email got forwarded to other people that I didn’t know, and the next morning I had a copy of his birth certificate in my inbox. The value of your living relatives cannot be overstated, so use it while you can.
Start With Broad Searches
This is a trick that I learned from someone who volunteered at a Family History Center in Salt Lake City and it has proven to be valuable for me. When you are trying to find your relatives on public collections like a census or birth certificates, you are actually less likely to find what you are looking for if you immediately put everything you know into the search criteria. This is often the case, because there are a lot of mistakes either in what you think you know about the person you are looking for or in the records themselves. When you search for someone, start with just a name, and if you don’t see anything promising, add a location and try again. After that try adding a year, but always execute your search after adding more criteria so you can see if you are getting closer or not. Try to use the principle of zooming in slowly, e.g. when adding a location, start with the broadest criteria you know like the country or state, then add a suspected county or city. It is also useful to ignore first names or use a more generic part of the name people will often go by a different name than is listed on their birth certificate even on official documents like a marriage license or a census.
Never Import Someone Else’s Tree
While it may seem like a shortcut to simply import information from another tree that someone else put together, you will be surprised at how much bad information gets passed around and simply copied and pasted, because people don’t want to take the time to check their sources. It can be useful to look at someone else’s tree to see if they have linked documents that you can use, but if you just import someone else’s tree, you can very quickly find yourself deep into a rabbit hole of bad information that has been copied and pasted over and over again without any real evidence. You are also robbing yourself of the reward of discovery by just trusting others’ work implicitly. Tree sharing has its place for sharing information, but there is always time to do something right when you consider that you could end up doing it at least twice by doing it wrong the first time.
Get More Sources
The more time I spend looking at old census records, the less I am surprised when I find out that there are two people with the same name in the same city of about the same age. Along those lines, I had an awkward moment with my wife when she came home from a trip overseas and we were opening the mail together and found a check addressed to me for $500 from a woman thanking me for showing her a good time. It turned out that there was another man by my same name that just lived across town, and this woman hadn’t bothered to ask for his address, but just looked it up in the white pages, assuming that there couldn’t be two men with the same name in such a small town. I had to assure my wife that I hadn’t been bad while she was away, and I got to meet the other guy with the same name as me. As a general rule, when I am looking at a document about an ancestor, I try to cross reference it with at least 3 data points that I know from other sources, before I am confident that it really is the person I am looking for. The more sources you have that agree, the better your information is. The slower you are to jump to conclusions, the more likely you are to be right when attaching a record to one of your ancestors.
It really is rewarding to learn about your progenitors. I have found some amazing stories that have inspired me like a man who went from working at a factory making nails to becoming a doctor that was a hero in his community for giving his life treating people with typhoid who couldn’t afford to pay him. If in your searches you find out that you are related to someone who helped hide the liberty bell, then look me up, because we might be distant cousins. No matter what you find, I can promise that you will be inspired and it will change your life for the better, so get out there and start digging.