So, you want to find out about your roots? Just how to get started on the internet can be intimidating, especially if you are not accustomed to the internet. Search engines such as google, and yahoo, can be of a use, but they are not designed for genealogy specific searches, so you may end up with 20,000 pages, but many will not be of any use. I have used google, because you can refine your searches within your results, and can show 100 results per page. To do this I suggest first put in your surname you want, for example, Smith (I would be cautious with common names, because you will return way too many hits to be of any use.) After the results come up, and there will be alot, you can refine your search at the bottom of the search page on google, at this point you may try "family, genealogy or descendants" or you can add a first name, ect. Be as specific as possible when using an internet search, and even though you may still end up with numerous hits to search, you may just find someone has put that information on the web that has been eluding you. Now, I know, there are alot of genealogy sites where this information can and is displayed, but sometimes your average internet citizen has put his homepage together and put all this information on there, but didn't know or care about hooking it up with some of the genealogy specific sites. I will discuss those further.
Ancestry.com, is a free/paid search service you can use, and it is very useful. Personally, I found the fee to be minimal compared to the information I have found on it, so I did subscribe for three months. At the end of that time, I may renew or not, but I will try to come up with as much as I can in the meantime. What I like about Ancestry.com, is that you can use a soundex search, and although it isn't available for all their databases, it does include the most important one, the census database, which of course, is a paid search.
The information obtained from these searches will give you page numbers, or exact information to go to to find your documentation necessary for concrete genealogy research. They have databases on marriages, deathes, military service, books, ect. Some of the free searches include the message forums, social security death index, telephone listings, and family tree information submitted by other people. Personally, I do appreciate that Ancesry.com does not charge for access to family tree information provided to them, and the make it easy to submit the information yourself, which I am in full support of.
Another site is Rootsweb, which is the largest free genealogy site, and is closely partnered with USgenweb, another organization which is promoting free information on the web. A search under Rootsweb will give you data on multiple areas, including the USgenweb archives. For a common surname you can search the states archives individually, which is recommended. (Always, use surname only for better results.) Rootsweb also allows free space for webpages, as well as gedcom file uploads.
Another site is family tree maker's partner, genealogylibrary.com, which is another paid subscription service. You can subscribe monthly or yearly, and they have several states 1850's census with images available. If you are no where near a facility to research this information yourself, you may find this useful. They have alot of information Ancestry.com doesn't, and vice versa.
I have spent alot of time using all these sites, and using varied spellings. I have found alot of information, and patience and perseverance are the key. The best site for all links related to genealogy is Cyndi's List, which will lead you on the right path. I suggest bookmarking this page, and visiting it often. A great site you can reach from her list is the Bureau of Land Management's site which includes a searchable database of land patents (from homesteading, ect). This site can be obtained from the Land section on Cyndi's List.
Okay so now you know where to start your search, here are some recommendations on what to look for, and what to do. First of all, bookmark pages where you find information that is important, because trust me, you won't remember where you found it. (This is saving as a favorite place for AOL users.).I have a notebook binder, with lots of notebook paper, and clear paper protector sheets to put in important information, and I still find myself hopelessly unorganized. I print out all emails I get with relevant information, and have tried to stop writing notes from my internet searches on them. (You can never find your notes that way). I subscribe to a few relevant email lists. I recommend only a few, because you will find some will have lots of emails every day, I have received over 100 in one day from one list, so be careful with how much you join up for, unless you don't mind all the emails. I do recommend the mailing lists, because you find not only information, but people who are knowledgeable, and willing to help. Networking is essential. I not only post to the message boards I find relevant to my names, but search them, because some of my most important finds have come from someone I found on the board looking for information on the same lines. Turns out, I knew something they didn't, and they knew something I didn't. Be patient, you may not get any responses right away, but you never know what will turn up. Message boards can be reached from Ancestry.com, Rootsweb, and USgenweb. Once you have compiled your lists of facts to verify, or leads, ect., you can then go to the library, LDS center, or archives and search for the hard copy information.
The LDS site (Church of Latter Day Saints) has searchable information online, BUT, be careful, look at this information as leads only, because much of it is submitted by people like yourself, and some folks, just aren't careful about verifying ages, marriages, ect. It can lead you down the wrong road, but it can also give you a good idea of where to start, just don't take any of the information as the gospel truth, and you should be okay.
Debunking the Myths of Genealogy
Jennifer Mieirs
A friend of mine recently said; there is a storyteller to every generation. Genealogy is not just charts and bloodlines, it is the story of our families, our history, and on a larger scale, tells the story of our country. It doesn’t take long to see the patterns of emigration, the links between families, and that some of our most common held beliefs about our society, and our history, are erroneous. When we think about the past we have certain preconceptions about the values, the codes of conduct, and the moralities of our ancestors. So often, these preconceptions come from books, television, and movies, that put a romantic air to the past, overlooking the life of these people, our ancestors, altogether. A few years of research later, here are some of the things that I have learned.
While it is nice to believe, that love was the purpose behind marriage, often it was not. Marriage of necessity, of practicality, was probably more often the norm. While stories of true love surely can be true, and surely, hopefully, there were positive feelings, often, especially in the rural areas, in the “frontier” and “pioneer” days, people got married so that someone could take care of the children, or work the land, or provide for a family. Those that remained in civilization on the East Coast, in the big cities, didn’t need to marry, those in the country did. My great, great grandmother Margaret Trahern, and her cousin, Susan Daniels, who had been living with the family at the time that Robert Trahern, Margaret’s father died, both married within months after his death. Admona, Margaret’s older sister took in the younger children, but the house was already full with ten people, and surely, Margaret who was sixteen, and Susan, who was fourteen, were not discouraged from making their own homes. In Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell goes into great detail of the proper behavior of a southern widow. Maybe my ancestor’s weren’t proper, because often they were married less than a year after the death of their spouse. Most often they had young children; something the men probably felt unable to cope with, and creating a burden on a women to provide for her children.
With that being the case, the notion that men didn’t marry older women, is surprisingly untrue. They often did, and sometimes the woman was ten or fifteen years older, which seems more surprising than the much older man marrying a young girl. While we accept that older men married younger women, it is hard for some to accept that in some cases these women were what we consider children, and as young as twelve and thirteen years old. Once a girl approached menarche, she was no longer a child, but a woman. While it is true, that girls are going through puberty earlier now than in the past, twelve is not such an early age, and these young girls, are and were some of our ancestors. History buffs may find it humorous that some of the laws on the books, such as it being illegal for a horse to defecate on the street are still on the books. The relevancy of that statement is that today in 2002, in Louisiana, the age of consent for a girl is thirteen, and in Arkansas it is fourteen, a fact some parents I know have been unhappy with. While laws requiring parental consent to marry have been added, these laws have been in place for many, many years, and point to how “old” was old enough in the view of our ancestors and society.
My parents divorced in 1976, and not many of my classmates were from divorced families. The divorce left a stigma on us, and was not looked well upon within my family, though within a decade, divorce was surprisingly more common. The idea that divorce was not looked well upon, that it was unacceptable to society, probably comes from the Victorian age and the values of that time period, from the late 1800’s until the 1920’s. By 1940 and after World War Two, the picture perfect scenario of family life was cemented into our culture. Surprisingly, much earlier on in our society, people did divorce. Wives left husbands, and ran off, or husbands left wives, more than likely for the same reasons they do today. I don’t think human nature has really changed that much, our lifestyles are vastly different, but the emotions that rule us, they are unchanged. In some states, and in some time frames, divorce was harder to obtain, but it still happened. Sometimes they didn’t bother with divorce at all, they just had another family. Absence of a spouse doesn’t always mean death, and sometimes it wasn’t spoken of, it was one of those taboo subjects families didn’t discuss.
After a few years of genealogy research, and hours of achingly typing data into my files, I can tell you, I am eternally grateful I was born in a time when the word birth control was acceptable and common. When you see a woman marry, be it at twelve or twenty, have a child every year and a half to two years, and die within a few years after the last one, or with the last one in their forties, you have to wonder at the quality of life they had. Not that their husbands treated them as brood mares, but seven to fourteen children is a lot of kids, and I can’t imagine the prospect of spending most of your life pregnant. With that in mind, children did seem to leave home at early ages. With a large family, especially in hard financial times, such as the depression, some of the older children left to make their own way early in life. I asked a great, great aunt, who left home about this, and she said, no, it wasn’t that her mother wasn’t a good mother (her father had died), or didn’t love her, but that the times were hard, and she felt in the way. The notion of quality time wasn’t part of their lifestyle, things we take for granted, they lacked, and so the bonds within a family were different. There loyalty to each other was perhaps stronger, families did stick together, and help each other out, they did look after their elderly, and their young orphaned relatives, and while it was more extended, it wasn’t necessarily closer. Often in the press, the nuclear family has been blamed for what ails our society; genealogy teaches us that that may not be so.
Oral tradition is one of the best resources for our research, but there are problems with it. More often than not, the stories we read, hear from an elderly relative, or that are passed down within our families contain some truth; they just aren’t entirely true. It doesn’t mean the teller has a faulty memory, I think it has more to do with the way in which time, and events are remembered, and, as in the childhood game telephone, things can get distorted with each retelling. Research of the native American families are difficult, because the different tribes didn’t keep records, and in fact had no need for a calendar, that was a European concept. Knowing this, it is necessary to take everything with a grain of salt, and to be open to speculative theories, but not entirely trust in anything without proof. I don’t think this problem is restricted to my Native American research alone though. If you ask someone in a small rural town about an event, they may not know what year it happened, they may recall it as the year such and such happened, or about so and so years ago. These are the reservoirs often of our family history, the places where our oral tradition still lives on. It is important to realize however, that as we live our lives, we don’t intend necessarily to retell the events of it, so we may not have logged all the facts into our memories, we may get a name, a date, or an event wrong. Some of the minute details we look for in our research aren’t necessarily what we consider important in our day-to-day lives, so you can’t take every interview as a hundred percent accurate. Memories are like people, we all have faults.
Scandal, illicit behavior, crimes, and secrets, they are probably present in every family tree. The Wild West was really wild, but it wasn’t just the west that was wild. Children were born out of wedlock, some of our ancestors were murderers, or wanted by the law. They ran off with the spouses of their sibling, and did all sorts of things, that make the search more interesting, juicier. The telling of every family contains skeletons in some closet or the other. For my birthday, my parent’s bought me a book on John Wesley Hardin, published only locally in Pensacola. My father was quite upset to realize we shared a connection to such a cold-blooded killer. What my father doesn’t know is that in reading the book, his great, great grandfather is described as a disreputable character, and the brother of his great, great grandfather was hung for murder. I find that interesting, it doesn’t reflect on me as a person, it is just an interesting tidbit of my family history. While out of respect for those alive, who would rather not let their scandals be known, I omit some facts, the truth is, to be true to what genealogy really is, you have to accept it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Genealogy isn’t about finding a royal ancestor, or an Indian princess, or being related to a famous person. Often, instead, it is about common people, who worked hard, and led extraordinarily normal lives. The challenge in genealogy may be it’s biggest reward, the discovery of something that you work tremendously long hours to find, the thrill of unlocking the puzzle that is our own history. At the heart of every true genealogist lies the love of the hunt, the thrill of discovery, and the realization, that it is up to us to find the stories that remain.
