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No, ma'am. Every time I've looked, I can't even find myself or my father...
If you can't find anything on ancestry.com, or from the LDS, your only other option is to do the actual finding yourself from public records.
Well I haven't gone on ancestry.com yet. It's expensive and I don't know if it's worth it. :shrug: Have you used it?
My brother does genealogy, he says there's nothing on there he couldn't get from the LDS for free (he's a member of the LDS church, so he could be biased).
I've used the LDS site and found loads of records on my family. It seems they have revamped the webpage and with that there are some weird omissions. Like my own birth record. I could swear my parents' full names were listed. Now, only my mother's maiden name. Still there are some other things that are newly available. Like the image of the county record book listing my father's birth.
I also found an image of the civil war pension record for a distant relative. That was interesting.
familysearch.org is the website...(since no one seemed to want to say it.)
Unless there is another one, of course...
between that and ancestry.com (free and trial)I've traced most of my family back as far as the Reformation...
from there my suggestion is to see where you left off, and look for a historical society in the area...
I have found a good bit just by googling. I also eventually managed to find a gentleman in New York, who is from a separate branch of my mom's family, who had traced it back to the 1400's in Germany. What I did was googled names and dates, and checked out geneology forums, and that was how I found him.
Well, this guy is far enough removed as family, that he spells his last name differently, so you just never know who you will meet. It turned out that he had met my great uncle who lived in Colorado, and we email each other back and forth, because we have a common interest. The way I originally found him is by googling the names of my original ancestors in boones mill, virginia in the early 1800s. That brought up some discussion forums, and I just started reading, until I found an email contact.That's really cool, and lucky, to be honest. I would be surprised to find anything like that, on either side of my family. Both sides are just not interested in the least. They couldn't care less about anything like this at all, so it'll be all on me. A good chunk of my father's family is already gone, and my mom is the only one left on her side, so it'll be tough.
Well, this guy is far enough removed as family, that he spells his last name differently, so you just never know who you will meet. It turned out that he had met my great uncle who lived in Colorado, and we email each other back and forth, because we have a common interest. The way I originally found him is by googling the names of my original ancestors in boones mill, virginia in the early 1800s. That brought up some discussion forums, and I just started reading, until I found an email contact.
That's cool. My husband, when he was doing this, was hitting a brick wall, no matter which way he went. He couldn't get farther than maybe 2 generations, and just nothing. Then we found a motherlode of people who were spelling their name with an A instead of an E, and when he went that way, he found a great deal more family. We found out that there were a ton of screw ups at Ellis Island, names being spelled incorrectly, etc.
After he retired, one of my grandfathers made quite a "hobby" out of genealogy and contributed greatly to the research on his family, right down to discovering the first New World ancestor buried in Barbados. He left lots and lots of stuff, file cabinets full, and I eventually became responsible for them. I passed them off as quickly as I could to another genealogist, someone from a branch of my family that I'd never heard of.
I can only trust that now that he has died, the work is safe. It may not be; the spouses and children of those interested in genealogy (read that as "committed to" or "obsessed by" in many cases) are often very resentful and uncooperative. There was a lady with whom my grandfather corresponded for years and met several times to share research, but when she became older, her daughter refused to let him see her and tore up his letters. Bitch.
I myself just don't have the head for genealogy. I grew up listening to elders talking about second cousins once removed and all that, and although I have tried, I just can't keep anything straight. I have a sibling who can, but she's another caution for those researching their family backgrounds. Some of the stuff she's put out there on the Internet is incorrect.
Caveat emptor (per DP rules, let the buyer beware).
Exactly!
I have found that different spellings are quite common.
I've been interested in geneology for 30 years or so. When I took Enligh Lit 2 in college way back when, our term paper was a geneology study on ourselves, and that interest has lasted. It's pretty cool to know where you come from, what kind of people produced the unique individual that is you. My dad's family has been very difficult to find information on, but there is a wealth of information on my mom's family, back to the initial American immigrant from Germany, who fought in the American revolution.
I'm not "avoiding" saying the name of the site. I just said the Latter Day Saints website because I knew it would be more readily known than "familysearch.org." Nothing nefarious going on at all.
Maybe I'll go with ancestry.com for a month or two. I know it used to be something like $99 a year and now it's $25 a month.
That's cool. My husband, at one time, was interested in this, and if you can believe that all last names are somehow related (especially odd last names, such as his) he found a relative all the way back to being part of the "court" of Tsar Nicholas the 2nd. He never linked it, but his is such an odd last name that we felt like there was a connection.
Sometimes they run a free trial for two weeks, that's what I did when had some free time, canceled it after the initial free period was over. When I get some more free time I'll subscribe for a few months, but I don't expect to go too much further back, it would be more for breadth...
*** Oh, as an interesting side note. I actually had a distant relative contact me through ancestry.com from Germany to clear up a few faux pas' on my tree... I thought that was pretty cool...
See if any of your relatives know anything.
My uncle did tons of research and now I know what clan from Scotland I come from.
I also found out that way way way back my family from my mother's side had a serfdom :allhail
You can certainly find interesting things from family members, plus, it allows you to reconnect with relatives you may have lost touch with, double whammy
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