How to Research Your Family History

Now that I'm older, I find myself questioning my family history. When you're young you have no interest in sharing conversations about family history with your elders. Now that mine are gone, I can kick myself for letting time go by without learning more about my family history, leaving many questions left unanswered. There are many ways to research information about your past family history. Passing family history to the next generation can bond and maintain family ties.

Ancestry.com is an excellent online web source to locate family members and put together a history of your family. This online web source offers fourteen free days of service but they require you to register prior to using the site. The cost of an Ancestry.com membership varies from $12.95 per month annually, $16.95 for a three month membership, or $19.95 for a monthly membership.

But before you reach out to Ancestry.com or any other online web source for your family history, you may find you have a better way to assist your research. The first and easiest way to research family history is by simple having conversations with family members. Sit down with your parents and/or grandparents, Aunts and/or Uncles. Ask them to share their memories of their lives growing up. I'm sure you'll find they'll eagerly share family stories which you'll find fascinating. The elderly population tends to recall more about their past family history than their present life. Take out a notebook, jot down notes or tape record your conversations. Video recording is a great way to maintain these personal family history memories, to pass down to the next generations.

Reach for the old family bibles, old photo albums, or the dusty boxes of family records hidden in the attic. You'll find these hand on resources can provide a detailed family history. You can also search the archives of town halls for records. My maternal family held family reunions where they put together small books that had family trees, photos, and shared family history stories.

Ancestry.com provides different record venues available for your family history research. On Ancestry.com you'll find, military records, census records, immigration records, and vital records such as birth, marriage and divorce records. They also have African-American records, court and land records, among others.

On Ancestry.com you can build a family tree for free. A family tree is a chart that shows the relationship of members of family over time, including dates of marriages, births and deaths. You start with yourself, add your parents and then continue to branch off into other family members, broadening the listings like branches in a tree. Genealogy is the study of families and the line of descent from their ancestors, defined by, Encarth World English Dictionary.

Ancestry.com provides historical records from the years, 1790-1930. This is a wonderful way to assist you in locating family members. Ancestry.com also offers DNA cheek swab tests for $149.00, which you can add to their online DNA base. These DNA records provide a newer way to connect to lost or unknown family members.

And lastly Ancestry.com has member forums where you can reach out to other members, place messages, put out a search for a family member, or read about possible family members who may be looking for you.

The website link to Ancestry.com is listed below.

http://www.ancestry.com/

You can also reach out to a professional genealogist in order to research your family history. The below website link is to the, Association of Professional Genealogists. Please do your own better business research before hiring any genealogist.

http://www.apgen.org/

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