I've always wanted to explore my family tree beyond my great grandparents. Has anyone done this? Is it really cumbersome? Is the service expensive? Can you recommend any sites? Thanks.
All the members of my family who have done it have either given up or gotten lost on the way. Theoretically it isn't difficult IF you know what you're doing...so if you decided to look up dad's dad's dad's dad and so on like that and stuck to it then you'd probably be OK, it apparently gets really bad when you try and make an actual tree out of it...
I have gone back to close to the post-Civil War period in Texas in my family, but going further back is harder. Of course, for me it is harder because my great-grandparents were born around 1880. The Mormons have a good database https://familysearch.org/ to start. Unfortunately, immigration records and other issues like that tend to get in the way sometimes. I've never paid anyone, except getting an ancestry.com membership one year and that helped get access to the older, digitized Censuses.
My sister is really into genealogy and has traced our family back to the 1300s. I know she's used ancestry.com and also some other resources, but I'm not sure what. My partner and I also attended a lecture on genealogy from an enthusiast at the gay men's social group we joined last year. The main thing it seems to take is a lot of persistence and research. If you'd like I could ask my sister about the resources she uses and any methods or 'how to' resources she could recommend. Just let me know if you're interested. Thanks! Todd
Thank you for the responses. Ellia Otaku: and, see, I'd be tempted to put in tree form, and understand how it all comes together. It's tempting. AC: I am aware of familysearch.org, and came to learn about it in a weird way ... you can see people's parents, and even people you know, who have died on it. I question how good their international capabilities are, though. Todd: 1300 is a long ways back! I'm thinking this involved crossing the ocean. I know it will in my case and wonder how good those records are.
It's going to depend on how far back you want to go. My day job is vital records. The older the record, the less information there is. Where I work, we go back to the late 1800s. On current death certificates, there's the person's information, and their parents names. On current birth certificates, you also have the person's parents birth state or country, and date of birth. Go back just a couple decades, and you only have an age and birthplace for the parents. Older than about the 1930s, we have different information. Instead of an age and birthplace, we have the "current residence" and occupation of the parents. There are some pitfalls, too. Don't count on spellings matching on older records. Baby Joe Smith might have John Smith listed as dad, and Jane Doe as mom, but dad's birth certificate might actually be under Jon Smythe. Some of these could be clerical errors, but going back in time, it's quite clear that various places simply didn't care as much about records matching exactly as they do today. EDIT: Many areas have a genealogy society that specializes in these types of research. The easiest way to find these is to check with wherever the vital records you are interested in are stored. This is usually a county clerk or health department. In the area I work, the genealogy society is affiliated with the local history museum.
I done genealogy for years and I love it. The reality most first time genealogists need to know that it is not free. Your gonna have to pay money to find what your looking for on websites or at historical societies or courthouses. Going to Cemeteries is free but paying for gas can be expensive. If you want to spend the money and have a huge interest in it and know the basics than I say go for it and have fun with it.
Definitely. It's rather frustrating for us pulling our oldest records that are all hand written, generally in a relatively nice, fancy script that is difficult to read. For us to get just one record for you from those books (in MI, the public can't look at the birth indexes, you have to request the record, and we pull it), it's not unusual for it to take us 15-20 minutes to locate and pull the requested record, and prepare it in a format that we can legally release it in. And, then we just charge the $10 for a certified copy, just like the "new" records that I can just take the information at the counter, walk back to my computer, type the name in, and print off, where you walk out in less than 2 minutes.
https://familysearch.org/ is pretty awesome and free. I would check to see if your local library has access to Ancestry.com. It will be free if you library has access,, thus saving you a lot of money. Also, depending on the stats, especially Ohio, the 1890 census records might nit exist. There was a fire that destroyed a lot of them.
