Discovering Your Roots with Genealogy

How close are you with the elders in your family? This includes not only your parents and grandparents, but your aunts, uncles and great aunts and uncles, too. There’s so much about your family history you could learn from these individuals, including stories told by their own parents, grandparents and other relatives. This information is priceless. Sadly, for many, the opportunity is passed, since they have become the oldest living generation in their families. Now they, as all of us do, have a responsibility to the next generation and beyond to tell their own stories.

You’re probably aware of websites, like genealogy.com, which charge money to search for your ancestors, but did you know there are sites which give this information for free? One of the largest of these sites is the Rootsweb-World Connect Project. Here you can enter information about your family tree and share it with others. If you don’t know very much about your ancestry, you can see others’ research and possibly find your shared relatives this way. It’s important that you have some information on your parents and grandparents, such as full names, including maiden for women, birth and death dates and places.

Another genealogy site is HeritageQuest Online, which has free access to U.S. Census information. You can search Army records, land patents and property records on GovGenealogySearch.com and the site contains over 45,000 national databases, including those used by government and law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, this one is not free. The Internet is a wealth of information, but the best source for discovering your roots is talking with older family members while they’re still around