Before you panic about the idea of charting your family tree, take a quick trip around the internet. There are a lot of genealogy sites that offer free “starters” from which you can fashion your own documentation, including a Google genealogy chart.. I strongly advocate this approach if you’re a beginner to family tree research. It helps a l...

Over 60% of the people in the US are currently doing some type of family tree research. Some get frustrated – there’s no question that climbing through the family branches is often an arduous and unrewarding task. Sometimes the leads break, turn out to be mis-remembered, or you “fall completely out” without any solid documentation for all ...

The Latter Day Saints, also known as Mormons, are a group that has tenaciously collected genealogy records in two forms, a library and an online research engine, the first of which has celebrated over 100 years of community service. The Family History Library was founded in 1894 in Utah to gather and preserve valuable family information in one cen...

When searching for your ancestors, you can only go back a few generations until you run into the immigration question. All of our ancestors, unless we are Native American, came from across the ocean, whether across the Atlantic or around the Cape of Good Hope and up to the Pacific coast. Many people came in through Ellis Island, during the years o...

There are many, if not most Americans here today, whose family members were immigrants at one point and were naturalized citizens, so tracing the roots of the family isn’t always as straightforward as we might wish it could be. Finding the date of naturalization isn’t all that difficult if you know where, and how to accomplish it. Find...

While it’s common for genealogists to review birth, death, and marriage records (to name just a few). One area that the “home” researcher might forget is reviewing school and alumni records. These have a lot of valuable information, if only from the vantage point of family stories. For example, you may discover that the odd looking antique ...

One way to expand your knowledge of your ancestors is to use occupational records. By so doing you can often distinguish between people with very similar or same names and discern to which you’re related. You can also discover family traditions that were passed down from generation to generation through occupational “secrets” or techniques. ...

Passports are among the best sources of genealogical data, especially for people born in other countries. Since 1925 onward the National Archives has kept these records on hand. Going back a little further, the department of State was issuing passports in 1789 too. And while you might think foreign travel was unusual this early in history, there w...

For a very long time among many different cultures, in particular the oral history was the only way of remembering one’s lineage and the important events of a group of people.  Even now, there are parts of each person’s history that no one but he or she knows. Unless someone asks and then considers it a duty of theirs and records the informat...

Thanks in part to the internet, finding a professional to research your family’s history isn’t at all difficult. The real problem lies in selecting between all of those you see. As you begin in your search, you will want to know a few things about the professional you are considering and the entire process as a matter of fact. Most pro...