Family Lineage

[SomeGuy]

Yar... I need some help. I'd like to learn more about my father's side of the family, seeing as he really doesn't remember a lot of it, and I've always been curious about it. He's told me stories about family members, but that's about it. I want to know more, about like my forefathers and everything, see if my father's family actually did something, but I really don't know where to start, could anyone of you fine people of IW gimme a hand on what I should search for? I know this'll be hard if no one has ever mapped it out before me.

[Firestormalpha]

Hmm... I'd suggest find a site that looks up Family tree/ history. Something like that. The main problem being that such sites are rarely if ever free.

[Kakero]

Interesting, you people there don't have a family tree book like we have here? It list every people that was born into the family, marriage, relatives and such. a very very old book indeed.

[Bungleau]

Geneology is the subject you want to look for... the study of one's lineage. Start with conversations with existing old folks, and look through records -- heck, do an ego-surf on Google and see where your family name comes up. Check for a family Bible as well -- people often used to keep lineage records in there.

What you typically won't find in the family, however, is the dirt -- if cousin Joe was a moonshiner, or if great-great-grandpa was a murderer. Families tend not to write those stories down... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Good luck! It's an interesting science and study.

[VulcanRider]

Are your father's parents still alive? How about his brothers/sisters? That's the best place to start. They can give you names of their parents/grandparents/etc, and the more info like that you can collect for free, the better luck you should have if you decide to hire a service to help you look.

[Larry_OHF]

If it is free help you are looking for, besides going to the court house and looking up information or the public library where they have extensive information...you can contact your local church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Every region in the world has a geneology library and somebody on duty to assist you in finding your information. The LDS church has the world's largest library on ancestery. If you don't want to contact them for whatever reason, tell me the name of the church in your area, and I will call them. I have a world-wide directory and will ask them to look stuff up for you and you can just go pick it up or something. Whatever you are comfortable with.

[SomeGuy]

Originally posted by VulcanRider: Are your father's parents still alive? How about his brothers/sisters? That's the best place to start. They can give you names of their parents/grandparents/etc, and the more info like that you can collect for free, the better luck you should have if you decide to hire a service to help you look.

Sadly, no, my grandparents died back in... '98 I believe. My grandfather's siblings are all dead, save two. My dad had only one brother, and I really have no clue how to contact him. My dad's family weren't.. ya know.. close. They were, but well, they don't keep in touch. So turning to them is kind of hard.

[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 ]