Saturday, November 04, 2006

Searching Your Genealogy – Your Family Tree

The family tree is often one of the most valuable heirlooms within a family. There are a great number of families in the United States that places a great emphasis on their genealogy and family history. Other families struggle through long searches trying to find answers as to where they came from, and how they got where they are now. Questions about who they look like go unanswered, but the desire to see their own faces in another human being grows with intensity.

But for many families, even though the information may be readily available on their genealogy, a wonderful family tree could be build, but it simply hasn't been started yet. These records can be extremely useful when researching the genealogy of your family. But record keeping wasn't a strong point of many of our ancestors, but birth, death, and marriage records have proven to be extremely useful, and are readily available online, as well as directly from the public records of many courthouses.

Putting together a family tree can be a difficult task. But in recent times, most people leave a paper trail, detailing records back as far as 20 years. As we fill out forms and sign documents, apply for loans, purchase property, get married, divorced, gain credit, and even destroy credit, we ourselves create this paper trail. It helps when you can give your project some organization right from the beginning. Set goals of how long each day or each week you would like to spend on your project, because there will be times you are truly addicted to your project, and just don't want to quit for the night, and other times you are completely frustrated, and won't want to touch it again for a year!

Frustration is one of the major reasons why people just starting to build their family tree end up quitting halfway through, never to pick up where they left off. Keep your project moving, and if you loose motivation in one area, try going back to an area you got stuck on in the past. A break in your thoughts can provide the ability to see clues you were blind to in your frustration. Try working on another area of the genealogical line for a while, and then later, come back to that which you were having trouble with earlier. If one relative seems to continue to provide dead ends, try a different relative. That's the true beauty of building a family tree. With extended family relationships, you have the option of using several different people searches to get information about the same relative.


Technorati tags:
, , , ,

No comments:

If you would like to see your questions answered here on our blog, just send us a quick email, and we'll get to it just as soon as we can! We'd love to hear from you.