How to Avoid Quitting Your Family History Research

Being able to get a new clue or a link in your family research gives new signs of hope of finally tracing your family history. Its a common reaction that gives you thrills of excitement but sometimes you have to control your emotion for the possibilities of let downs. You might not handle desperation and will discourage you to go on with your family research. Things like these happen probably more times than you expect. Before leaping with joy you better keep your cool and follow up your new evidence with more proofs.

Below are some theories that most people commonly use and end up quitting because they lack the ideas of finding possibilities and investigating further more. Do not rely on the data that you have gathered easily. If you have easily acquired some useful resources of your family history, its advisable to make independent studies about the data you have in hand. By doing this, you are unlocking mysteries and making your family research more accurate.

Always check the number of marriage

Never conclude that the children have a common mother or father. If you are basing your research from the man’s point of view, the children could be off springs from other women. They could come from this present wife, or his wife previously or even a wife after the one you have found. Remember that parentage is one of the hardest things to document, unless you know for sure. Women died in childbirth all the time. It was not uncommon for a man to have 2 or more wives.

If you can’t find a marriage record to support your family research its maybe because of these reasons:

- A lot of early marriages were not documented at the time of the marriage. It could have taken 5 years or so before the marriage could be written down in a courthouse.
- There might have not been a courthouse around or even a church; lots of early marriages took place in homes.
- Hundreds of records were burned during the Civil War.

Extend your family history research and consider every possible turn of events in the past

Don’t always assume that your ancestors came from the same state that their neighbors came from. Family genealogy includes possibilities of migration. In this case migration routes were basically the same but not every person follow the same route. You have to research further.

If you don’t find your ancestor in the next census record and you assume it’s because they were old and died, don’t just assume. Yes, most people did live the normal life span but people did live to a much older age also.

You have to research further, look at the closeness of their homes, how each of them named their children, and court records to see if they witnessed each other’s documents.

Don’t assume that your Jr. you found has the exact same name as Sr. Years ago the words aunt, uncle, Jr., Sr., and cousin were also used when the individual was no relation; in other words they were used very loosely. For example, you may have found land records that have Jr. and Sr. listed but these 2 men just happen to have the same name so to distinguish between the two, Jr. and Sr. were used.

Do not always assume that the name of an individual is a boy or girl’s name. Parents sometimes just liked a name and to us it sounds like a girl but back then it was a boy. Some names years ago were originally boys name but now they are girls. Parents also named their children after a famous person or a long ago relative.

Don’t always assume that a female that has the same last name as her father isn’t married. Women did marry men that had the same last name as they did. This happened a lot back when household were scattered far apart and relation lived fairly close to one another; cousins married distant cousins and cousin’s married distant uncles or aunts.

Keep in mind that divorced women did sometimes take back their original name and widows sometimes did the same.

Don’t assume that your ancestor died in the same place he or she was born and never moved around. It wasn’t uncommon for individuals to move their families many time but as they did get older, most moved back to live closer to their family. The best way of working on this is to create a time line and research many of the areas that they lived.

If your ancestor lived in one town or county and then you loose them, don’t just assume that they picked up and moved. There are other reasons you may have lost them. The county that your ancestor lived could have been broken up into several counties or they could of lived on the line dividing 2 counties. You have to research the surrounding counties.

Being a genealogist or family historian, assumptions is what keeps the research going but you have to recognize the trick as an assumption and prove or disprove them with further evidence.

About the Author:

Stellar Montealegre is the internet sale representative of Family Origin. She can give expert advice, guidelines and personal views on how to properly conduct family research and family tree making. You can find more readings related to family genealogy in her personal blog at Know Your Family History and on Trace Your Family Genealogy.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/genealogy-articles/how-to-avoid-quitting-your-family-history-research-515795.html

5 Steps to Get to Know about Your Ancestors

By Adwina D. Jackson

It is always fun to discover who are our grandparents, great grandparents, etc, especially if they were popular and smart people in their times.

If you want to satisfy your curiosity about your ancestors, these are the steps you can follow. Reveal all the secrets you want to know about your family by:

1. Getting Started in Genealogy

Do you know that there’s a study of family history? Yes, it’s called genealogy. It will unlock the door to what your family has lived through and provide you with a look to the world that they were exposed to. You’ll find that this is a very rewarding experience to be in.

2. Working on the Living Members of Your Family

Your family is a great source for genealogy research. The first thing that you will want to do is to work on names of ancestors by interviewing your families. What you’ll do next is to try to construct a family tree based on the names that have been given to you. In these interviews, you can also ask anything you want to know about your ancestors. For example, your relatives perhaps can tell you about the cities in which your family members grew up in or whether someone was in war. These are informational pieces that you can use to begin your journey into the past.

3. Finding Sources for Genealogy Research

Be creative in finding information. Using the web is absolutely a helpful effort. For example, if you learn that your mother’s grandfather was in the military, you may be able to find information based on this on the web. You could use old military records or even find info about something that he did heroically. These small pieces will open up the puzzle of your genealogy.

4. Taking Genealogy Research Further

As mentioned before, using the internet’s wide resources is very advantageous. There are also other ways to take the research: using the online databases provided by church organizations, using message boards, joining forums, and writing or looking for genealogy blogs. You probably couldn’t find the information you have been looking for by doing these, but at least they provide you with good advice on how to find your ancestors. If you become stuck and really want to track your family’s history, consider calling on a professional genealogical individual to help you in the pursuit. Often, they provide more information because they have the necessary resources already established to help you.

5. Preserving Your Genealogy Research

When you have taken time to do all the searches and collected so much information about your ancestors, it is now time to preserve all the data safely. Probably the best way for you to do this is to secure the information in a genealogy software program. This program will not only offer you a place to store all valuable information that you have learned so far but also help you get more solutions to your needs. Your genealogy means everything to you and you must provide the best preservation for it.

About the Author: Adwina Jackson is a working mother of a gorgeous young boy. Join her free e-mail guides about Genealogy Guides at http://insparenting.com/reports/genealogy.php. Visit her daily blog now where you can get helpful parenting stories and tips on: http://www.insparenting.com

Why Research Family History?

Family history research is a fascinating study which once you start it will probably turn into a passion.

Many people have asked themselves where they come from, where are their roots, and these questions reflect a yearning that all of us have. Genealogy is the science of tracing your family tree. It is a kind of detective work or paper chase game. The results are often unpredictable but always fascinating.

Family history research has recently gained a powerful tool in the internet. Now that it is possible to do a keyword or name search almost instantly, it has become much easier to trace a family tree. Easier at least than in days gone by, when a researcher had to spend a lot of time trudging around a dusty archive library, or waiting several weeks for a reply from one records office or another.

Even with the internet though, there are some parts of one's family tree which will be impossible to reconstruct due to certain historical circumstances. One example that comes to mind is the fire that destroyed the Irish records office in Dublin in the nineteenth century.

So you have decided to try to trace your family tree. The question is, where do you start?

Probably the best starting point is to talk to members of your own family, particularly elders, and try to get them to remember as much as they can about the past, and about their relatives and forebears. This can be very useful in providing some jumping off points for further investigations. The facts they are able to give may well help you to refine and focus your search right from the start, thereby saving a lot of potentially wasted time and effort.

Talking to people about the past is something that should be done in a sensitive way, as it can often awaken memories which people would rather forget.

Next you should decide what aspect of your family history you are going to investigate. Are you interested in finding out about everything you can about everyone related to you? Or do you prefer a more narrow focus, such as tracing one particular branch? Or perhaps you will keep an open mind at first until you find something in your family tree that provokes your interest.

Some people even trace their spouse's family. A friend of mine who is divorced nevertheless is tracing her husband's ancestors on behalf of her children, since her ex-husband is descended from an old aristocratic family who were very powerful and influential in medieval England.

There are many different reasons for wanting to research family history, each one of them is interesting to the individual researcher, and all of them have been greatly facilitated by the arrival of the internet.