Family Genealogy
 

I was at a funeral service yesterday for someone who was an avid family historian. She had filled a three-ring binder full of stuff about her family with press clippings, personal notes, public records, etc.

It got me thinking that while I don't want to go to that extreme, I am woefully unknowledgeable when it comes to my family history. I did some google-digging this morning and found obits for 3 of my 4 grandparents, and an article from a small-town newspaper about a family get-together, but then hit the paywall.

I know Ancestry.com is a popular site. I also know that the Mormon church keeps meticulous records on family histories, etc. Without having to sign up for subscriptions, do you know other methods of tracking down information?

I'd love to know a lot more about mine. I did a quick look a while back, and apparently there is a town and castle named after my surname in..................France.


don't hate me.

Like you said, ancestry.com costs money. My sister used it for a few months and it was awesome. Amazing what a person can find on their family in a rather short amount of time. If you think about the hours you would have to put into doing ancestry searching on your own, the time you save by using ancestry.com more than pays for that. Plus, like me, we found pictures from family in the 1800s. Found out a great great great grandfather was a high ranking person in the revolutionary war. And even found what ship he came over on before he fought for the States to separate from Britain. We actually traced one side of family all the way back to the 1400s.

I hope to go to the small villages I am from on the the russian/German border as well as the part in England one day and visit the land that part of me is from.

We ain't kin. Happy to help.

Perhaps I can take a few days off from work, do the free trial on Ancestry.com, and just go crazy digging in there? I wasn't sure how good it was. Interesting.

same here , but Ireland for me.

I did the free trial in ancestry.com a few years back, and it was great. If you're really interested, pay a little bit of money and save yourself a whole lot of time and effort. I was impressed. It took one branch of my family all the way back to early forest-dwelling hominids. When I retire some day, I'll buy a subscription and see if I can trace it all the way back to single-celled organisms.

since I'm probably of French decent, I think it's acceptable if I start a "I Quit, I'm leaving forever" thread.

It all depends on how many people did searching and added stuff on the same people you need to find. Some of the cooler things were seeing the actual census documents that showed what people were in each household of your family members. And finding the surprises also that people in your family didn't know about. Because I wasn't the one that did the stuff on ancestry, my sister was the one, I don't know how long it took her to get where on finding family, but it seems like once you get started, it went pretty fast. One person rolls into the next person. Just depends on how much info is on there already. Census info was the biggest help if I remember right.

My Grandfather was really into it, so we have our family all the way back to the ship that brought us across in 1638. There is some contention about the family before that, but if it is the chain we think it is then we can go back to the 1400's. We do have some pictures and notes from my Great-Great-Great Grandfather, which is kind of cool.

I'm from the Ozarks, so my family tree stopped forking at some point in the 1800's. As to where we're from, probably England or Scotland.

This