There was strong interest in starting a genealogy category on WGOM, and I've been sitting on this until I had my surgery to have something to work on while recovering. Since there are a plethora of genealogy related topics, I'm going to make this a stream-of-consciousness introductory post to touch on a lot of things, and entertain ideas for future posts to tackle specifics.
Genealogy is is possibly the second most searched topic on the web (behind pr0n, obviously) and as the years have gone on there has been a flood of data made available online.
There are many aspects of genealogy that intrigue people and get them fired up research their own families, but one of the biggest drives is also one of the most misguided: everyone wants to discover that they're related to George Washington, Charlemagne, or any number of famous figures in history. My recommendation is not to get caught up name-grabbing -- the further back you go with your research, the more chances that mistakes are made. Much more meaningful is to gather the stories and data of your more recent ancestors.
First rule of starting your genealogy research: begin with what you know. Begin with your parents, and their parents, etc, as far back as people can provide. This is your base. Using US census data (now public up to 1940) you will be able to flesh out their families and track their movements. In addition, several states had rudimentary state census "on the 5's" between the US census decades between the later 1800's and the early 1900's. Obviously the further back you go, the more people you will be tracking. I found it most convenient to limit to your direct ancestors and their children, although I would take some side branches down if there were relatives I was close to in those branches.
Second rule of your genealogy research: if you don't already have one, get a library card! There are multiple pay sites which have genealogy data, but most all of them provide free access (some limited, some complete) through your local library. In addition, most library systems have helpful resident genealogy assistants available to answer questions. There is no reason to throw money at Ancestry.com or other pay sites, at least not until your tree has expanded enough to need help.
Third rule of your genealogy research: gather source information. These could be primary sources (birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates) or secondary sources (letters, family stories, military service, passengers lists, church records, cemetery markers, etc). In all cases, document where your data comes from! And for crying out loud, get copies of photographs -- it's wonderful to have faces to go with the names. (In the photo above, those are my great grandparents in front, and my mother's father second from the right in the middle row.)
You'll find that your families congregated in certain locations, and it is valuable to get to know the various Historical Societies in those cities / counties. My mother's side spent years in Douglas County MN, and the folks at Alexandria have been very helpful in getting family info, property data, etc. Mrs. Runner had ancestors in Rutland County VT, and helpful researchers there as well as a third cousin of hers had a lot of useful help.
You will want to find a website or software to record what you find. I use an older versions of Family Tree Maker, but if I were to start now, I think I'd create a tree at FamilySearch and have it on the cloud -- the Mormons are leaders in genealogy research. In all cases, be sure to enter your sources when recording each piece of data -- this will help in eliminating questionable entries.
If you are up to it, it's also valuable to have online visibility. I used genealogy as an excuse to learn HTML, and used free RootsWeb (which has been sucked up by Ancestry.com) to host my webpages. I have had countless contacts by relatives (and non-relatives) of me or my wife over the years who have stumbled onto my website via some search engine. It also makes for a nice repository to share info with others in your family who might be doing research as well.
Here are some example sources I have used in doing research on my side of the family and my wife's side of the family.
One thing you should definitely do is set some goals. One goal I had was to take each branch of my family and my wife's family back across the ocean. I've been mostly successful -- my side is pretty much right off the boat, but that includes ancestors from northern Germany 1860-1870 with the difficult-to-search surname Will which has been a tough nut to crack. My wife's side has some fairly longtime US residents in it including Civil War vets from both sides, but she has an Irishman with a fairly common name (James Morgan 1860s) and a Prussian with an uncommon name (Grzmocinsky 1880s). I've been sitting on them, knowing that someday some group's effort to digitize data that will include the smoking gun I've been looking for.
A few useful terms:
GEDCOM -- the standard file extension/format for disseminating a family tree
ahnentafel -- ("name table" in German) this is a numbering scheme for identifying direct-line ancestors and descendants. If you are person #2 in your file, for instance, your father would be #4 (2 * 2) and your mother would be #5 (2 * 2 +1); your father's parents would be #8 and #9.
soundex -- this is a system for organizing names by phonetics to better find matches on names which are difficult to spell consistently. Format is a first letter followed by three numbers; here is a converter to play with. You will find many lists indexed by Soundex for convenient searching
patronymic surname -- think Scandinavian, where the child's surname is based on the father's given name. Torsten's children would be Torstensson or Torstensdatter, for instance. btw, generally you'll find Norwegian and Danish surnames ending with ...SEN, and Swedish with ...SSON. Patronymic naming ended by national decree throughout the 1800s to early 1900s.
Cyndi's List -- Cyndi Ingle started a list of genealogical websites grouped and categorized, and it's pretty much grand central station for finding specific information by location or whatever.
Sorry this has rambled so much, but I wanted to get some groundwork out there to spur discussion. I'd be happy to answer any questions or take suggestions for more specific help.
okay, hopefully this post primes the pump...
Very cool.
My dad's side has info going back to Europe in the 1800s. It's pretty cool.
One thing I noticed from reading their stories is that the flu and pneumonia really sucked.
And when you look at the Civil War and that the majority of casualties didn't actually occur in fighting...yeah, health was a huge factor back in the day.
One important thing to keep in mind (says the historian): Even primary sources can be deceiving or outright false, particularly when it comes to recording cultural information that is outside the experience/understanding of the recorder. For example:
Several years back I started some preliminary digging into my family as a diversion from an actual project I was working on (tracking a particular vet of the Polar Bear Expedition whose father was rather prominent). I was using US Census data from the 1920 survey, the first for which all of my family was present. My great-grandmother & her mother were the last of my family to come over, joining her brothers in Minnesota after her father died. The "mother tongue" for both women is listed as German, but I know that my great-great's native language was Hungarian. (They emigrated from Austria-Hungary just before the war; their village is in present-day Hungary.) My grandfather didn't learn English until he went to school, but spoke both German & Hungarian at home – German with his parents (so his father could understand), and Hungarian to his grandmother (who was the head of the house).
---
My maternal grandmother recently moved out of the house she's lived in for 68 years. She gave me a few pieces of family history, including her father's Army discharge papers & her parents' marriage certificate. I knew my grandmother became a Catholic when she married my grandfather, but what I didn't realize was that her parents were married in the Church of the Brethren. Her father's discharge has him working in the Quartermaster Corps at Walter Reed and does not indicate he ever had a rifle qualification, so I wonder if he was a pacifist. I mean to ask her the next time we visit.
One fallacy that you will read about periodically is that a family's name was changed ("Americanized" for instance) at Ellis Island -- this simply did not happen. A family may decide to use a simpler surname when coming to America, but it did not happen at Ellis Island (or Castle Garden, for that matter).
I should have mentioned above how important it is to keep historical context when doing your research. Things like the 1918 influenza pandemic played havoc with the world, as did wars, blizzards, and any other of many world events.
The name change thing has been the most daunting when it comes to tracking down my ancestors' immigration records. Two sides of my family last name likely had an umlaut in the spelling of their surnames. Figuring out how it was recorded when they arrived has proven difficult. I know the year one side immigrated, but haven't had much luck finding the record.
I have long wondered about my own family name. It is short and looks like a common Spanish/Italian word, despite no findable evidence of ancestry from either of those cultures. We have semi-credible evidence that takes us back to the Revolution in America, but nailing down those details has been hard (without spending money).
Thanks Rhu - My dad's been working through his family for the past couple of years and has discovered some pretty interesting history in unexpected ways - railroad employee with connections to Vermont & New Hampshire church records. His dad's side - Swedes, assigned/assumed the surname Johnson & only goes back three or so generations, but he was able to connect to the community of origin in Sweden - they met distant relatives there when visiting last year. The family always wondered what happened to the brother/sister combo who headed for America.
More to come, but it turns out, his mother's side (English/Welsh) has been in America for a long time.
Mom's side is Irish, emigrating in the 1870-80's from County Laois (formerly Queens Co.), so going back to Ireland via Catholic church records & family knowledge is/was easier.
I'll certainly be sharing your suggestions with him!
There are WONDERFUL records to be found in Scandinavia should you find the community there that your ancestors came from. There were informal church census held every few years, as well as birth, marriage, death, baptisms, and anyone arriving or leaving the community. Geneline was a service I used a lot for this; I bought a week several years ago and every now and then they have free weekends when I've done some further digging.
My dad just sent me a genealogically related message the other day - baseball player Verne Clemons is his 3rd cousin, 3x removed
I find this conversation fascination despite no current desire to learn about my ancestry. I mean, if someone just dumped a load of info in my lap I'd read it, but I don't know why I've never had any inkling to find stuff out. I do like history quite a bit. Maybe part of it is because with the exception of my paternal grandmother, the family I did know going back that far are generally not people I want to know more about.
One of my great-grandfathers is thought to have murdered his own brother, but nobody is really sure. And another one was the town pharmacist and published his own almanac my dad has a copy of from 1928, which is cool.
Nobody in my family has the foggiest clue about our European background. My name is English/French. But even as far back as my great-grandparents, nobody was 100% anything. It's very possible if my paternal family was English, then they were here back in the 1600s or 1700s and there are no immigration stories to easily dig up.
Okay, maybe I am kind of interested. Anybody want to do the work for me? :o)
That's kind of where I am. I'd love to read it if someone else did the work, but I have no interest in doing it myself.
The possibility of black sheep in the family is always a deterant to some people, but the way I look at it, it's water under the bridge at this point.
For me it's less about digging up skeletons than it is the people I do know are mostly dull.
I think you'll find most people have those kind of trees, with only some events of note in them.
One of the coming-of-age realizations in our family has been the date of my paternal grandfather's birth compared to the date of his parents' wedding. My great-grandfather played in a dance band before he was married; apparently there were groupies back then, too.
Heh, I still remember doing a family history project in college and calling my dad one night to ask if he'd been born a couple of months prematurely because I was looking at the date when his parents were married and the date when he was born. The answer: no. For years when he was growing up, they'd fibbed about the year they'd gotten married to hide this from him.
My dad used to joke that my brother was born overdue just to mess with his spinster aunts (he was born 11 months after the wedding).
I am a fan of wikitree.com. I went through a spasm of tree building a year or two ago. Pretty nice, free platform.
Dad's done a fairly good job in cobbling together a very expansive tree. I have an 11th great grandfather born in 1600 (loc unknown), who had a son in 1630 in Maryland. Maryland wasn't granted a royal charter until two years later. My oldest known relative is a 14th great grandfather born in Staffordshire in 1460 (making him two years older than Louis XII). Also, I have a distant relation (My dad's first cousin 12x removed's husband) who was Lord Mayor of London and an MP.
To what degree is privacy an issue with a genealogical site like FamilySearch? I understand that part of what makes genealogy possible is people being willing to put themselves out there, but being intensely aware of privacy concerns in the modern era, I'm a bit wary of using any service (especially a free one).
Most sites do not publicly display living (or potentially living) information. If you upload a GEDCOM file to one of the major websites, the site generally does the filtering. On my own homebuilt website I leave out any important dates of living relatives.
Genealogists for years have been harping at financial institutions to quit using mother's maiden name, etc. as a password or acknowledgement question, as that information is way to easy to find. The best advice I've heard for companies that insist on using mother's maiden name is to use something obviously wrong ("Delmon") and stick to that for those types of questions.
I just use my first pet's maiden name instead. Or was it the maiden name of my first car? Thank goodness for master password apps.
I didn't bring up DNA studies, I realized. They are definitely helpful in finding relations. I haven't tried it myself (I know my patronymic line pretty well) but a fellow researcher on my wife's side has used it successfully a couple times. It can tell you if there is a direct relationship, and possibly how many generations of separation.
NBB Roots:
Father: SMSGT in USAF, Air Traffic Control. Service tours in Korea, Panamá, Vietnam, Australia, Philippines. American Legion Commander, Forty & Eight.
Grandfather on the father's side came from Virestad, Småland, Sweden in 1904 on the Norwegian steamer Hellig Olav (Kristiana -> New York), through Ellis Island, and settled in Garvin, MN. He had been put up for adoption back in Sweden - I found the church where he was baptized, but the roots trip ends there. Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) was also from that part of Småland, so I pick him for my lineage.
Great Grandfather on the mother's side came from Thuringia in Eastern Germany, also put up for adoption, in the area between Gera and Jena. The family name was Rossner (I saw a suitcase with that name in the museum at Auschwitz by Oświęcim, Poland), but there was also some linkage to Kiev. But since he was adopted, the trail ends there.
If you have a birth date for your grandfather, you should be able to find a birth record at Genline as well.