Posts Tagged ‘researching family history’

Researching Your Family History

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Perhaps you want to learn more about your great-grandmother. Here are some steps that you can take to form a research plan:

1. Take some time and write down everything you can think of about the people you plan to research. Include details such as approximate dates and places of birth, marriage and death; spouse’s name; children’s names; and any other details you feel may help you to distinguish your ancestor from other individuals.

2. Write down exactly what you hope to learn about the person you’re tracking. Once you start your family history research it’s very easy to get sidetracked. With the excitement of uncovering new family facts, you may lose sight of why you decided to trace your family history in the first place. For this reason, writing down your aims in your basic plan is important. You may wish to look into an old family story or myth, or focus on finding out as much as you can about one particular side of the family, for example.

3. Conduct a search using a genealogically focused search engine to get an overview of what’s available. Sites like Ancestry.com are great for hunting information about your great-grandmother. To start, just enter the name where the person you are searching lived to narrow the results. The data that you obtain will give you an indication of the range of resources available.

4. Prioritize the resources you can use. The results that are delivered on these genealogical search engines could turn up different resources like mailing lists, newsgroups, and one-name study sites. It’s a good idea to prioritize the resources you are planning to use. A great starting point is to visit a website that provides access to civil registration documents such as Ancestry.com so you can start trying to verify dates of birth, marriage and death.

5. Schedule time to use the various resources that you identify. Researching family history is a lifelong venture. There is no way to download all the documentation and information you need at one time. Because it requires a lot of time and effort to research your family history, it’s best to schedule specific times to work on specific parts of your research plan. Genealogy is addictive; breaking it down into scheduled research time enables you to get the best out of your research plan without getting bogged down with information.

Don’t forget that there are plenty of websites that allow you to create your family tree online for free. One that I recommend is Mundia.com. As you are doing your research on your family history, keep detailed notes and share your findings with your family members.

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Family History Research

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

No matter what sort of project you are undertaking, you need a good plan in order to be successful and researching your family history is no different. Not everyone considers planning to be an enjoyable part of family history. The best part of a project like this is finding out more about your family. However, carefully crafting a research plan can be an invaluable step. Every family history research plan should define who and what you’re looking for and each task should be prioritized. If you take the time to plan your family history research, you will be able to save a lot of time because you will be well organized and focused.

You’ve heard, no doubt, that the Internet puts the world at your fingertips. And true enough, you can find literally millions of names, listed on thousands of family history websites, all waiting for you to discover them. However the multitude of online resources can leave you feeling a bit dizzy as you navigate from one site to another for hours at a time. Recording everything that seems even remotely relevant to your family tree is also incredibly tempting, regardless of whether it actually relates to one of your family lines.

Because of the immense wealth of information available to you, putting together a research plan before going online is very important. This can save you plenty of frustration and hours of your time by keeping you focused. Tens of thousands of genealogical sites are available on the Internet. Without a good plan you can get lost in no time at all when researching online. You might be surprised at how easy it is to get lost on the Internet, especially when you start tracking a person just to find out hours later the person wasn’t even part of your family.

To prevent this from happening, you should go about online research exactly as you would if you visited an archive.  Having a research plan an making notes of the websites you visit and what you find there saves you repeating research later down the line. Websites often change their appearance and you may not recognize them on a return visit.

If you are the type of person that likes to keep everything organized, you will probably want to keep your notes on your computer or in a special notebook. If you are able to keep track of what you need to do and can remember where you left of when you resume your research after a pause, you might be able to keep your research plan in your mind. This simply means you can have an informal plan or a formal one as long as it helps you keep track of what you’re doing.

If you’re looking for a great website to create your family tree online for free then I recommend using Mundia.com. In addition to allowing you to create your family tree, you can also collaborate with your relatives and upload documents, photos and stories related to your family members. It’s very easy to get started building your family tree on Mundia and registration is free and easy. One of the nice features about the site is the ability to search other family trees in the database to look for possible matches for your own tree. If you really want to learn more about your family history, this is the place to start.

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How To Find Family History On Your Own

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

 

Have you ever wondered what galaxy you came from? Maybe you can learn how to find family history of yours and then discovered that it was your great-great-great grand uncle who discovered that the world is round or something like that. It’s actually fun when you try to learn how to find family history and some people even made it as one of their favorite pastime- creating their family tree and trying to unravel the mystery behind their cultures and tradition, why they keep on doing things like this and thinking that maybe the answer lies in the past and the past might be their key to the future of their clan or family. Would you love to learn how to know your family’s historical background and maybe unravel the truth that you are the rightful heir to the throne of an unknown country or you might be supposedly king of a whole bunch of lovely wild Amazon women?

I, myself, have been fantasizing about learning the real truth about my family history. For all I know, if I can trace family history of my own, I can get t learn more things in the past that could be keys to the future, right? But of course, if you really want to know more about finding your family’s genealogy, you need to learn more than just asking from your parents, your grandparents and other relatives. You have to find a very systematic method on how to find the history of your family.

Learning a systematic way seems like it’s the job that can only be done by professionals. But you can also be an expert in clan history if you just knew what the right system is. Thank goodness, there are now some several guides or learning tools that can help you learn the art of researching family history. If you go through the Net, you might stumble upon some good reviews of the best family history research guidelines. I would definitely love to know more about these to learn more about my own family’s history. How about you? Are you willing to learn your family history on your own?

 

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Want To Know Where You Really Came From?

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

 

Genealogy, according to several encyclopedias and other reliable informative resources, is the study of your ancestry, your family’s past lives or your family’s history. Although this kind of branch of study is sometimes done in a professional manner like for instance by historians, tracing back the roots of some famous people or something, there are some ordinary souls who considered researching family history as a new major hobby. For sure, somebody here would really like to know something about their ancestors, right, if given the right chance, the right opportunity and of course, the right learning tool.

But to trace family history is not that easy. Sometimes, you have to approach some of your living ancestors, if you have one, and asked them questions about past lives and all of that. But today, if you want to know more about your own family tree, there is an available web site on the Internet that can help you out and it’s called “my family genealogy dot com”. Here an appropriate book guide is presented which can help anyone learn the basics of how to do family genealogy history step-by-step and everything is explained in full detail.

Here is one example of what you can learn from this book called “You’re Related to Whom? How To Research and Create Your Own Family Tree”. According to this book, you can start your search at looking at your parent’s birth certificate or use a marriage certificate. A certificate like this would be better as this shows not only the couples’ names, but the names of their parents as well (your grandparents). Then, you can get to know the father’s and mother’s names of your grandparent and so on and so forth. Whew….that would really be a very tedious task now, would you agree? And sometimes, after spending some time unearthing and unraveling, you could end up in a brick wall. But learning how to find family history is never easy but it can be simple if you can learn the right system of family genealogy.

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