Life wasn’t always dreamy—but, for a family historian, even the less-than-perfect times may have had a silver lining.
It is easy to romanticize the lives of our ancestors. We like to think of them as hard-working, independent people.
The Web is full of answers—as long as you know which ones to trust.
There may still be a few diehards who distrust any information obtained online, but for most of us, online databases have become a major source for indexes and images associated with family history. But can you trust the information you find in cyberspace?
The Web carries whatever a user posts without regard to quality or value.
Veterans can be reticent about sharing accounts of their combat experiences, unless the listener is the right person or an incident triggers the memories. It took both in the case of my mother’s youngest brother, Clifford F. DeRevere.
Finally we can all have a reason to like taxes–we can put them to USE when LOOKING for our family history.
Never has a government said, “Golly, we don’t feel like collecting taxes this year. Let’s just skip it.” You pay taxes. Your children will pay taxes. And your ancestors before you paid taxes.
For the family historian, DNA is one more type of evidence. Used together with the names and associated dates and places of events obtained from traditional sources, it can help us identify an individual uniquely, and also distinguish a person from other people with similar names or ages who were in the same place at the same time.
Confusion is almost guaranteed when a family insists upon using the same first name in multiple generations. Let’s say a man named John has six sons, including one named John. All of the sons, in turn, have a son named John. The result is six first cousins, a grandfather, and a father all with the same name. There needs to be a way to tell them apart.
Most of us started our family research looking for our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. We may have occasionally branched out to include one of their siblings when that sibling was our own aunt or uncle, particularly if we already knew or had heard stories about that person. But, eventually, the tendency to concentrate only on our narrow, direct line returned.
The unspeakable happens: a flood, fire, or other disaster strikes your home, and all of the family history records you gathered over the years are destroyed. Fortunately, you’re prepared, right? You made a backup copy of the data and stored it at a friend’s house.
But once you start your research again, you wonder why you came to certain conclusions.
Most of us started our research from home and family sources. First we questioned older living family members, and then we quickly went on to whatever documents the family had saved.
Taking a look at ethnic records can help uncover new details of an immigrant ancestor’s life.
In central Ohio, on any given weekend you can find church services being conducted in Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese. These congregations are bound not only by religious belief, but also by language. And so it was with our ancestors.