Personal Experience in Researching Family History

Many a person has desired to know where they come from. We may hear stories from relatives or live in a place where our family has lived for generations. You may have heard that your great-uncle served in World War II or that another ancestor was in the American Civil War but not know much beyond that. For my husband's family, some names had been gathered, but there was much more to sort out and many life stories to be told.

The first place that I turned to in order to verify the data that I had been given was www.familysearch.org. There you can search the Social Security death index, which I did in order to verify some sketchy dates or dates that were missing. Familysearch.org has proven to be an invaluable resource in researching my family history. With the dates figured out, I began to sort out family lines and place them according to family group sheets. There are several programs to do this. You can purchase a family tree maker or you can use one from an online service, such as Personal Ancestral File, which is free and available for download at www.familysearch.org. Also, www.ancestry.com has a family tree maker, but the site does charge a small fee.

As I began to sort out the family lines and search for people to give than names other than "Mrs. So-and-So," an excited feeling overtook me. Here was history - real history! We often read articles or watch movies about people who lived during certain time periods or about historical events. But these were the people who witnessed it, who these events directly affected, whose decisions may or may not have been made based on what was happening in the world around them. I thought about what it must have been like for them to have lived in one place their entire life. Did they ever want to move? Was life a joy to them or simply just something to be endured? Every person has a story that deserves to be told.

I kept going, linking generation after generation. Sometimes there just appeared to be a name coincidence and I could not fit the person into the family tree no matter how I tried. Other times everything fell into place. Many times I turned to the Internet. Some cemeteries have the names that are on the tombstones listed online. I found one ancestor, a great-great-great uncle who had served in the American Civil War. I typed his name in to a search engine only to find out that he had served in a regiment that was in Atlanta when General Sherman burned the city on his March to the Sea.

When I was finished with all the data that I had found and my father-in-law had gathered, I found that I had eight generations on one line, and several other generations on others. I have traced back the lines through their introduction to America, but have not yet begun to trace them back through their ancestral lands in Europe. I have learned so much about lives in the American South during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Doing genealogy has made history come alive for me.