When you are looking to trace family trees, you have a wealth of
information at your disposal. There are numerous genealogy
search engines out on the Internet, exceptional record-keeping
kept by most every town, city, state, and country, and a huge
number of people who enjoy genealogy for its own sake and want to
help you with your search. All these resources are excellent for
diving into family trees and digging up new nuggets of
information that will help you extend your family tree up a
little higher and out a little wider.
One of the best places to start to trace family trees is on the
Internet. Thanks to computers, family and ancestry information
can be stored digitally and family members can be linked to each
other. Genealogy search engines take advantage of these uniquely
computerized features to build entire family trees that can
extend quite a ways back and out. These searches are usually
free and can provide you with an excellent place to start your
investigations.
Once you have built up a database of information about your
family and your ancestry from Internet sites, you need to start
digging up records from public documents. Not all of these
documents are scanned into computers yet, so you may well need to
page through them by hand. Any information you can dig up about
marriages, birthdays, or names will help immeasurably when you
are looking at a warehouse full of small slips of paper, and you
need someplace to start. Do not be afraid and do not be
dismayed. Just pick someplace to begin and start flipping
through. Most of these should be indexed in some manner, so use
the index to aid your search. If you know your great-great-
great-grandfather Fred was born in 1865 in Lexington, Kentucky,
you start in 1865 in Lexington, Kentucky. It may not be the most
exciting work, but it reaps its own special rewards when you
actually find the slip of paper that tells you that Fred was born
to Jonathon and Dolores Smith. That is one more set of names
that goes into your family tree, and you found it and earned it
all on your own! These are the amazing moments that tracing
family trees can provide and they are rather remarkable.
As well, you need to search in unusual places that you may not
expect when you trace family trees. For instance, the family
Bible was often an heirloom passed down for several generations.
These books often have family trees written into them, allowing
you to see the work of those who have gone on before you. As
well, old correspondence can give a few names that you may not
have found otherwise, giving you another way to trace family
trees. And don't neglect Mormon genealogy. The Mormons have
compiled massive lists of genealogy and they provide this
information for free to anyone who wants to use it. Let the work
they have done start working for you.
When you decide to trace family trees, don't forget that the work
may be hard, but it is always exciting and always a unique reward
all its own. For every name you find and every new person on
your chart, it is another step into the murky past. And as you
step through farther and farther, you can begin to understand not
only the people from whom you are descended, but you can
understand a little more about yourself.
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