[Epona]

Good call Larry - I'm not at all religious but I was going to suggest to SomeGuy that your church keeps good sources for genealogy which might be useful, I know my grandmother used their records a lot when she was doing similar research.

Depends where you are in the world SomeGuy - in the UK you can go to the public records office to look back at birth, death, and marriage certificates back to something like 1837. For information prior to this date we would go to look at parish church records and search graveyards for headstones once you found out what town or village our ancestors came from. The internet is another valuable resource - do searches for genealogy websites and also your surname, mother's maiden name, that sort of thing - you may well find some distant relative has already done some of the work for you and put it online!

My brother has been very successful in his genealogy research - the earliest record of one of our ancestors dates from an 11th century burial inscription, and he has successfully traced many branches of our family back to the 15th/16th centuries.

It has helped his research that we have a very rare surname, and that none of our ancestors seemed to move far beyond East Anglia in the centuries after the Saxon settlements there!

He's also discovered that we have distant relatives in the US, Canada, NZ, and Australia (one family member was transported for stealing sheep or something like that!)

[ 05-30-2004, 10:25 AM: Message edited by: Epona ]