You Are Related to Whom?

The quest to find where your family’s roots were first planted can be a very thrilling pathway to navigate. The place to begin your quest is to question your immediate family. Ask your oldest relatives about the immediate past they can recall; gather an oral history of memories from all of the relatives you can locate. Do family bibles, diaries, personal journals or other written history exist that contain births, deaths, marriages, military records, and discharges? Is there a repository from the past in the attic, shed or basement of the old home place? From this information you may have a wealth of knowledge or maybe just a place to start, or nothing but your surname to go on.

Now the detective work starts. Your work will take you to well-lit research areas of libraries, musty smelling church archives, dusty courthouse records departments, newspaper microfiche files, hours and hours of online research, local cemeteries, historical societies, and any nook that an obscure tale or name found by sheer happenstance points you toward.

The research material you will encounter includes searching obituaries, various death record repositories, military death and pension records, and census records are all places to dig and poke to find the history of your family. Newspaper archives can offer insights into your relatives by searching birth, and marriage announcements or searching for pertinent news articles containing your surname. Thanks to the internet, some searching can be done for free, and there are multiple genealogy research sites you can join to help feed your detective sensibilities. Don’t overlook police records from the past, they sometimes offer knowledge hidden from view that could point you in a direction never before followed in your genealogical quest.