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Tips for Tracing Your Tree
From researching my own family history, I've pulled together some tips on how to trace your family tree:
- Interview your parents or grandparents.
- Get names of ancestors, their spouses, their children, and their siblings.
- Get places and dates for births, marriages, divorces, and deaths.
Assemble a pedigree chart covering the last four generations of your family tree, recording on it important family data (birth, death, and marriage dates, for instance).
- Get copies of family photos, identifying names and relationships. Consider getting a good digital camera for making copies of photos and other records that relatives may not want you to take out of their home to the local copy shop.
- Record any family stories that have survived, moves or migrations, noteworthy achievements, and so on. Remember, you are not just recording your family line, but are functioning as a historian and preserver of your family's legacy.
- Find out if anybody else in the family (aunts, cousins, grandparents, and so on) have already done any genealogical research on your family line.
- Identify your oldest living relatives. Fill-in information on living relatives and then start researching your family tree back one generation at a time, working from information you have already confirmed to information you need to fill in the blanks.
- Find online tutorials and beginner's guides on researching your family tree. There are many excellent resources available online that can provide you with valuable tips and guidelines on researching your family history.
- Search the Web for geneological research on the surnames you've identified as composing your family tree. Discover others who are researching the same family lines so you can share information and fill in gaps in your own research.
- Visit the library. Public libraries can be great sources for genealogical information and family histories, especially if you still live in the area where the ancestors you are researching were located. Even if in another area, many libraries let you search their catalogs on the Web and participate in book sharing programs.
- Search census records. Census records are available from 1790 through 1920.
- Find out if ancestors were involved in wars. Civil War records, for instance, can be good sources of genealogical information. Participation and roles in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and other important national events can be important parts of your family story.
- Research cemeteries where ancestors may have been buried. Gravestones and other records can provide valuable genealogical information, such as birth and death dates.
- Send for any birth, death, and marriage certificates that you do not already have for members of your family tree. These can be valuable documentation proving a paricular family connection, since they usually also list the names of parents.
- Research the LDS church's genealogical repositories. Check to see if they are available in your local area, either through a genealogy center or local LDS church.
- Hire a researcher. This can be helpful, for instance, if you are living in Portland, Oregon, and need to do research on cemeteries in Rhode Island, but can't visit there yourself. Researchers can be hired who'll visit cemeteries and search other local public records that can't be accessed over the Web or through the mail.
- Use genealogy software to record and organize your family tree and details of your family history. This can also facilitate being able to share research of your family tree, and get research back in return, through GEDCOM files that can be exported. Genealogy software may also come with CD-ROMs containing surname lists, census records, and other genealogical data.
- A PDA or laptop can be a valuable addition for taking data with you when doing research in the field. The latest PDAs have non-volatile memory cards with enough capacity to be of real use. Genealogical software is available for use with PDAs (including Palm, Window's CE, and so on). PDAs are probably best used as reference tools, allowing checking to see if you've already researched a family connection when you're in the field, for instance. They can also be used as data collection/entry tools, but a laptop is probably a better tool for that (allowing more depth in the data you're gathering, which can be important when backing up your conclusions).
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I've include below links to HTML GEDCOM files of my main family lines:
- Simpson GEDCOM. Here's my father's family tree, including my ancestors with these family surnames: Simpson, Bannock, Smithson, Johnson, and Sanderson.
- Peterson GEDCOM. Here's my mother's family tree, including my ancestors with these family surnames: Peterson, Wilson, Jammison, Morrow, Richardson, and Sanderson.
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I've include below links to galleries of family photos:
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Here are some of my favorite links to genealogy resources on the Web:
The Genealogy Page at the National Archives and Records
Caleb Johnson's Mayflower Web Pages
British Columbia Archives
Genealogy Family History Research in Illinois
Genealogy Resources on the Internet--Nebraska.
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