Your Family History is unique and is going to be one of the most interesting research projects you have ever worked on it. Trust me, I know. I have been doing serious genealogical research for about 40 years and there is nothing more exciting than learning how to trace family history.
Genealogy and Family History:
The two terms genealogy, and family history, generally mean the same thing to most people but technically they refer to two different parts of the research. Genealogy is accepted to mean your genetic line of ancestors. A chart that starts with your self and moves back in time through each generational set of parents is called a pedigree chart.
Pedigree Chart:
The pedigree chart shows names and dates of your ancestors, with some locations and that is about all. The fun part come in when you start to put meat on the bones and actually learn about the lives of your ancestors and that is called the Family History part.
As we mentioned in our previous post on this subject, you must start with yourself and record all of the details about you that you can and then you work on each successive set of ancestors moving back in time.
Vital Records:
Find newspaper stories about your ancestor’s births, deaths and marriages. In many states where the Vital Records were not kept until more recent times you will be apt to discover that searching for articles in these old newspapers is the only place that you will find a record of your family members.
Tory or Patriot?
You will have many surprises for sure. I remember when I started working on one of my family lines I got back to the Revolutionary War era and I kept finding references to a man that had the same name as my ancestor and the newspapers were telling how he had been arrested by the Americans as a Tory (Loyalist) and that he had been banished from his property for a year during the war.
Surprise!
Well surely that could not be my ancestor right? Wrong, it sure was! Well guess what? He has become my absolute favorite ancestor to do family history research on. His life events got recorded many times in many different types of documents and newspaper stories because of his prominence and I have had a half of a lifetime of enjoyment finding out little tidbits of information on him from research centers all over this country and in London, England too!
The war stories that have been handed down in your family will become very real to you when you read about the events in the actual time period that they happened. Many wonderful hours await you when you trace family history events.
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