Geneology... anyone into it? Research tips?

[97RangerXLT]

Anyone into Geneology? Got any tips as to ferret out the names/ dates of ancestors without having to pony up money to Ancestor.com or similar to see documents?

Obviously documents from family members (family bibles, collected stuff from grandparents, great aunts/ uncles etc. These will also give you a basis to check some of your finds in your further research.

I have found that if you know where some of your ancestors are buried, (even as vague as the state and a general time frame of 50 years or so) http://www.findagrave.com can offer a lot of info, such as parents, children and dates. I have had a few lucky surprises for both sides of my parents families with this site. even found a picture of the headstone of my great great great grandparents where they were burried in Alabama.

Once you get some of that basic information, google can turn up other links or bits of info. Found the marriage license of my great great great grandparents on my Mom's side online in an archive for the county that they were married in.

so, for those of you that are into this, what are your tips and tricks?

AJ

 

[swynx]

I am also interested as my father was adopted and I have only ever met 1 of my 4 grand parents who is now dead.

I remember my dad went to a store that did ancestry stuff but basicly they said to use the internet and pay a fee.

I have found out a bit about my family by talking to old ranchers and what not in smaller towns.... like confirming my dad was born in the back seat of a station wagon behind a bar.

 

[The Jester Race]

My Aunt did/is doing our families genealogy. I don't know anything about the process or research, but I know we have a relative, a great uncle or something, that was in the SS and in order to join, a candidate had to prove that all direct ancestors born since 1750 were not Jewish. So in essence, the first 250 years of our genealogy was done before my aunt even started.

So maybe you have someone in your family that has done some research already.

It's pretty neat some of the things you might find out about your family.
Sure did find some pretty interesting things about my bloodline and ancestors.
My grandfather was a nuclear engineer. He worked on the Manhattan Project and helped develop the reactor for the USS Nautilus.
The family name traces back to the late 11th century comes from a now dried lake in Westphalia Germany.
My bloodline is pure and traces back to the early 8th century, to before Germany was even a country.
And the Pièce de résistance, I'm descendant of a Saxon King.

 

[doorgunner]

I found my father's birth certificate.....his first name was SUE!

According to the old folks who lived near my grandparents house----my grandma was messing around with some guy named Cash---sounds likes a real winner.




Anyhow.....my dad's immigrant parents got off the ship in New Orleans in 1902 and APPLIED for citizenship at the courthouse about two blocks from the Mississippi River......they both learned ENGLISH because they were glad to be AMERICANS......

My moms side of the family were here already(info that was given to me by my grandmother by word of mouth)....great-great grandpa was a soldier in the Confederate Army who played the bugle before combat....my great-grandma (his youngest daughter) said that he was hallucinating on his deathbed--he thought he had a bugle in his hands and was playing it......

I guess war runs in the family....always on the side of the under-dog.....the South (Me.......the South......South Viet Nam, I "played" the machine gun)..............

 

[straycat]

We had paper work from over 200 years ago. We had a lot of farmers and inventers in the family along with some bankers and investors and lots of land owners. I joined Ancesery.com and found out a lot and even got money that was owed us and put in an escrow. Over $100,00 in Bearer Bonds and some cash savings form our grandfather who retired from the rail road way back in early '61. He had put in over 40 years. His pension was put in a fund and my grandmother never knew about the extra money that was put aside...almost $40,000 that my dad found for her. About 10 years ago we found the bonds in an old steam truck my grandmother gave us. It had a storage area under the trunk that we just happened to find when we went to clean it up and put it in another living area in the house. Whoever physically holds the paper on which the bond is issued owns the bond (no name required to cash in the bonds). The money was split up between 6 family members and the land is still owned by my family and not for sale.
Ancesery.com is a good place to try out.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

I am lucky to have grandparents that can easily go back to their grandparents. I can cover once they got over here fairly well, what happened on the other side of the pond I don't know much about.

The really neat thing about it is you get stories rather than this guy married this lady (maiden name unknown) and had these three kids and so on.

Right around the turn of the century my mother's great-grandmother came over on a boat from Sweden in her mid teens. She got sick and met a kid about her own age that took care of her... once they got over here they got married.

You don't get that kind of stuff from old census papers. One REALLY neat thing about Facebook is that our distant relatives may have some insight about why we did what we did and how things happened like they did.

 

[97RangerXLT]

85, I agree totally with you on the verbally (or written) passed down stories. On my
Dad's side one of his great uncles wrote a brief history of our family all the way back to my Great Great Great Grandfather (his Grandfather) Speaking of Facebook, we found a geneology site for our family name and someone had posted a picture of the gravestone of the afore mentioned Great Great Great grandfather. It was kind of neat to see that in color without having to drive to Alabama to do it. the caption on the picture said what cemetery it was located in, and that little bit of info we did not know. so after a bit of digging around on findagrave.com we found another link to *his* father, which we did not have. The facebook photo of the headstone also had this really neat story of bravery/ badassery on his part:

The story, passed down from parent to children, is that he left Georgia with his wife, two children, and all of their worldly goods on a sleigh-type conveyance pulled by oxen. The year was about 1845.
During the search for land, soon after coming to Alabama a memorable adventure took place. They had camped out for the night under a tree. He Was awakened by a noise overhead. He saw a cougar crouched on the limb directly over him. Stealthily he reached for the handle of his bowie knife. Just as the cougar sprang, he raised the knife and impaled the animal on the sharp curved blade.

On Mom's side, her mother is a descendant (great great neice of the 5th President of the USA James Monroe. Also an interesting story on Mom's grandfather... he was quite the run around and really treated his wife horribly, and while they were never divorced, they are burried on opposite sides of the cemetery from each other.

Mom's Dad's side of the family came over from Germany on the same boat that the Brother's Grimm came over to America on.

My Dad's Dad was a POW of the germans in WW2. I recorded him talking about that experience and also Grandma's view on it as a wife that just heard that her husband was captured. (she kept a scrapbook of all of the correspondence between her and Grandpa, and her and the state department and news clippings of that era. That is another project, I am trying to restore that scrapbook) but having their voices recorded was probably one of the best things I did. That was over 20 years ago, and I did that as part of a college history class project. I have since converted the tape to MP3 format.

All sorts of neat history int he family. I did get Family tree maker 2014 for Christmas, and I can record those stories along with the persons involved. keeps it all neat for future generations.


I do highly recommend talking to the older members of the family, record them if you can, because once they are gone, many of their memories and experiences are gone as well.

AJ

 

[brokemechanic3000]

My mother traced our family back to where we came from in Norway then couldn't find anymore. You see tracing ancestry back in Norwegian is hard because the last name of the first born son starts with the fathers first name then ends in son (Oleson means the fathers first name was Ole) all other kids use the same last name as the father. I found out that as far back as I could find the men in my family were always farmers or mechanics a tradition I am proud to say I continue.

But to the point my mother did this mostly by going to the library or courthouse to find out this stuff. While it was free it also was very time consuming.

It is neat to know exactly where we came from in the world I would like to someday go to Norway but I don't have the money and don't want to be the typical American tourist, So I want to learn about the customs and language before I go.

 

[tmcalavy]

Cool story about the railroad and grandpa's bearer bonds, but more often than naught all you find is a skunk or two in the wood pile. The Mormons in Utah have a big and used to be free bank of geneology info that anyone can access.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

I also found that you can get old service records from the National Park Service.

I found the two of my ancesters that fought in the civil war on there, the free thing just gives their rank going in and rank going out with a brief summery of what their units did. You can get a more detailed report for something like $30.

 

[Mac]

I've used Ancestry and Family tree before and Geocites while it was still running. Several other sites that are free. Depending how far back you go, have to watch for duplicate names and close to the same dates. Often times brothers would name their kids the same, just carring on tradition form generations before them. Seems like there weren't many names available then. If you get back into the early colonial times, you run into names like
Temperance, Prudence, Deliverance (that was just in one family), cousins were experience, Thankful, and Patience. Any trait from those days was the fact if a family lost a child in their first year, next one born was given the same name. Far back relation was Governor of New York in 1702.

Yep, even back then. He showed up at his wife's funeral in drag. Queen, his cousin, had him removed. The churches in England kept very good records way back before 1000. They kept all the tax records. Found a football game from 1447.