Research how they lived, how they cared for their children, and what made them act the way they did. Understanding what your relative’s daily lives were like can provide you a better idea of what the old laws were like and what society was like when they were alive.

Start out by getting journals and letters of your oldest relatives. Ask grandpa for permission to clean out his attic. Talk to your family about any ideas they have of where to look. Your enthusiasm for documenting your genealogy is sure to get you a lot of volunteers for information.

The next thing you want to do is organize the journals and letters. Sort them according to individual and timeframe. For example, you’ll end up with one box of your great grandpa’s history with everything arranged from the earliest date to the most recent.

Write out what you read in the information you’ve obtained. One example of somebody who documented her life is Laura Ingalls Wilder. Because of her books, we have an excellent idea of how people lived on a daily basis. As you document your family history, you can also breathe new life into your records. Don’t hesitate to take a break in your writing to call grandma and grandpa and get more details about certain events.

People love to recount things that happened in their lives. Try to fill in any gaps in time while you’re writing about your family genealogy. Ask grandma and grandpa how they were raised. Who provided for them? What did the people who provided for them do for a living? Find out about any childhood memories they want to share. You’ll want to make sure you record your conversation so you can play it back and make sure you don’t leave out anything important.

Your family history is the best treasure you can uncover. As you dig deeper, try to find out why people did the things they did. Was it because of certain laws? Was it due to an unwritten rule of society? Write everything you can down. When you are finished, you will have the first draft of what is sure to be a document that will be treasured for years.

Add more to your document by researching on the internet and at the library. Review anything you can find on the towns your ancestors lived in. Find out what was happening in the town. What led to the founding of the town? Who all lived in the town? If you can, find someone who was living there the same time your relatives were there. Ask that person what he remembers about your relatives. You are likely to hear interesting stories that your grandparents had forgotten.

When you are finished, you most likely have enough material for one or more books. Polish up your writing. Pass it on to your family for their comments and changes. Your family history can then be printed out and bound into beautiful books to be published or to have a special place in your children’s homes.

Up and to the right of your dad’s name, place the name of his dad with the number 4 under it. Below the name of his dad, place the name of his mom with the number 5 under it. To the right of your mom’s name, place the name of her dad with the number 6 under it. Underneath her dad’s name, place the name of her mom with the number 7 under it. Your diagram is now getting filled out.

By now you can see that you need to leave yourself plenty of room when you create a genealogy diagram using the pedigree chart. The benefit of this system is that if you’re not sure about the names of one of your relatives, you can just leave that part blank. For instance, if you have no idea who your mom’s dad is, you can just put in a blank with the number 6 behind it. Numbering is just a way to make sure you include everybody in your genealogy chart. If you go back four generations you will end up with the following.
Yourself
Your mother
Your father
Your grandmother on two sides
Your grandfather on two sides
Great grandparents on both sides
Great Great Grandparents

Your family tree has some branches that everyone is proud of. Your own parents, or grandparents are going to be among those people. Why not document their lives for them, and give them a unique book to pass along. What’s the best way to tell a story? in photos and documents of course.

Family tree scrapbooking lets you get the story told, and do it in a unique way. Taking a blank scrapbook and selecting some interesting textures and colors that are favorites of your subject is a great way to start.. If they have interests such as quilting, golfing or other things, integrate those into the scrapbook.

Begin with documents. If, for instance you’re doing a photo scrapbook of your father, who is an avid golfer, find as many photos as you can of his life, from start to present day, and put them into a book with pages whicha re decorated with a golfing theme.

Gathering together the images, the documents and other things you want to add will take a bit of time, but speaking with relatives who may have photos they will let you use, or your mother or grandmother, who may have baptismal certificates, marriage licenses and those little handwriting awards he got in third grade will make your project so much more personal and interesting for him and for you both.

Making your family tree scrapbook is going to give you new insight into who your dad, or your grandfather really is, and give them a real thrill that you took the tinme to explore their life up until now. What a great way to get to know a parent as a person, to revisit their childhood and understand more about them.

Family tree scrapbooking tends to make quite an impression on the person you make the scrapbook for, as well as on you. Take the time to put together a scrapbook for someone you know. Make sure that you use only copies of the documents rather than the real thing, in order to keep them secure.

GeneTrees DNA testing can give you the answers you’ve been waiting decades to get about the family, your ethnicity and where you actually came from.The GeneTree web site offers you the chance to learn more about your own heritage, and just maybe to get back in touch with relatives who are still living and learn a lot more about your common ancestry. GeneTree permits you to expand your horizons, to interact with family members who may be living in other countries and to explore your own unique family and preserve it.

With its state of the art DNA testing you will learn more about your family history in a single test than you could by scanning the worlds information for your entire lifetime. While learning more and more about each family member is always pleasant, learning that your great grandmother is Irish and not Italian as you thought will offer you valued insights and new places to look.

In fact, GeneTree gives the word family a whole new meaning, giving you new answers and probably leading to new questions. We’ve all laughed as someone else asked.. where do I come from… but we’ve all asked ourselves that same question and wanted more answers, more information and a way to get the answers we’re looking for with greater ease and in a faster time.

GeneTree offers us those answers using some innovative new tools and putting some resources at your fingertips that you might not have expected to ever have at your disposal.

You have the chance to make a home page for both living and dead family members.

Your family tree is interactive and its searchable to find new entries and add them to your own information.

You can control the privacy of your information.

Your level of collaboration is controlled by you, so what is added or removed from your famlily history is under your direction.

You may order DNA testing and share that testing with your family and friends when it returns.

GeneTree DNA testing and web site can offer you a whole new world…quite literally.

Before digging into those however, its important to dig into your own resources, family members, personal papers and get everything organized and in order so that you have a method to your madness.

While thats of course important in any kind of sound research, its especially important when it comes to finding African-American research. There are some great resources out there that will even help you to develop a great methodology for your African American genealogy research.

One such book, more than ten years old, but still pertinent and relevant to your research in that it helps you to appreciate and understand the idea of contexting, will offer you a wide array of information on not just African American genealogy but all types of genealogy and how to move forward with it.

The book, The Source: A Guidebook Of American Genealogy (Third Edition) is available to you from nearly any book seller as well as from Amazon.com and offers you a chapter about Tracking African American Family History, and can offer you a great view of what other groups might have interacted with your ancestors, such as political or social or anti slave groups in any given area, as well as what effect local laws or regulations might have had on your ancestors travels and the records that exist of them.

Another wonderful resource, with a wealth of links as well as news in a blog type format that is helpful in finding out what new and upcoming African American information is out there on the net and in print can be found at Afrigeneas.com

Afrigeneas.com is a superb reference and a great place to start with your African American research.
It is a well organized listing of information and resources that will offer you a great many links to world wide information.

YOu will find a mailing list, a place where you can ask questions and get answers as well as information on gatherings and helpful insight in conducting your research along with The AfriGeneas News is an online newsletter that shares tips and methods as well as resources for your work in African American genealogy

Afrigeneas News is one of the more helpful and knowledgable newsletters online today with regard to African American Genealogy.

When you’re working with a group of people such as African American or Native American, about whom and for whom records are sometimes lacking or found in vague places, getting all the tips and tricks you can for that kind of research from those who have been there and done that is going to be helpful.

Happy Hunting.

Cases in point are orphans, adoptees and those who were sent to what were known in the past as the poorhouses, when both parents may have been lost for one reason or another.

Quite frequently the records for this type thing are not available when going back more than a hundred odd years, since adoptions records were not a precise thing.

How can you find where a given relative may have gone, or where they came from, in a case such as this.

One really good place to start is the Orphans Home Web site which is hosted by roots web and  will help you to find out some minimal information about your family tree, even those which are difficult to find.

On the Orphans home you’re going to find a great deal of information that has been submitted by volunteers who also assist in transcribing it, and the information will include fact sheets from various orphanages in the US and canada, as well as orphanage rosters, as well as some miscellaneous records of various orphans, including a list of records of orphans names.

There are also some census records which record the orphanages and those who were residents there.

Difficulty in finding and seeing adoption records opened is paramount in many cases in creating more difficulty for those who are orphaned or adopted in many states and areas.

The Orphans home web site makes it a little easier for the grandchildren and distant relatives of those earlier adoptees to make some type of family record or to find their earlier families and trace them back a bit further.

In addition, a new section thats in the works now, will make your life a lot easier if your ancestors are among the roles of the orphaned or adopted. The section on the Orphans Home web site will be called “Searching For An Ancestral Orphan”.

Particularly if your ancestors were cared for in the Soldiers Orphans Schools in Pennsylvania and were part of the those schools lists,  you will find some of the names and links here to be very helpful, since there are actual online rosters of the children who were part of the orphan schools at this time.

If you’re seeking out someone in your family tree who was an orphan during the 1800’s, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to begin your search at the Orphans Home Web Site. Not only will you possibly find what you’re seeking, but you will likely find other links or assistance there in the people using those forums too.

What contexting really means and what it involves is that you as the researcher understand what was taking place in the nation during the time span that you are researching. For instance, if your research was taking place during the civil war, it would involve you understanding that for much of the west, it didn’t matter a great deal, but for states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia, it meant a vast upheaval and a loss of a great deal of records, information and life.

Contexting means taking into account what was happening in that state, the city or the county that you are researching and knowing how that might have impacted what you’re trying to find.

Contexting means knowing also the particular prejudices that were impacting the country at that time. For instance in Russia, finding an ancestor during the time of the revolutions might have been impacted by what was taking place at that time. Particularly if your ancestore was part of the Russian aristocracy, you will find it difficult to find records of them quite likely. Knowing whether they were killed or whether some migration took place as well as the places they may have migrated to will make your work easier in the long run, and may in fact make it possible.

Contexting will also include knowing about and understanding the many groups and organizations that might have or would have interacted with your ancestor to make their travels easier to accomplish or their escape to somewhere else possible.
Those societies might have included churches or religious groups, political activists, or ethnic societies, such as in the case of the slaves, the Underground railroad may well have interacted with your ancestor on some level and you may find records of some type which have been unearthed from this group of people.

Contexting also involves one last process, which is that of learning or at least learning ABOUT and understanding the laws, and regulations, as they pertain to your own ancestor, their ethnic group or their place of residence. This may mean knowing that in the area where your parents lived, your father and mother could not marry under the law because the two were not of the same race or color. Those codes or laws may well have a lot to do with your ancestors moving around as well as where you will find those records about your ancestors.

You can see where contexting is an important part of researching any group or family, in that it will give you valuable insight into the best places to find records to solve the mysteries that you are trying to solve.

Its interesting to go through the bios of the earlier pioneer women, but until you actively add up everything that you’ve got in their bio’s, you don’t have a full picture of their life, and the things they went through.

Women of the early pioneer era are mentioned only as mothers, wives or something along t hose lines, not as the pioneers, the actual strong women that they were who gave the heart to the Heartland of the United States.


The men who purportedly tamed this country are those upon whom the vast majority of the biographies are concentrated, and the women, who dealt on a day to day level with the hardships and the pain, the loneliness, who scratched out a living from the land and gave birth, often miles from any kind of help, are touched on in passing.
Examples are given on Ancestry.com, which include

“Our subject [Maj. S.K. Cramer] was married to Miss Hulda [sic] Frantz, March 22, 1843. She was born in Alleghany County, Md., March 23, 1823 and was the daughter of John and Catherine Frantz. Of this union nine children were born…Mrs. Huldah Cramer remained the faithful and loving wife of our subject until called to that better home, July 31, 1878.”

We tend to agree, that there has to be a lot more to the wife and mother than just that. Think about your own mother and what she went through. My grandmother, whose bio for her obit reads, Mary ____ wife and mother, married 1906 to F.W __ mother of… etc etc

Mary was a wife in the great depression, and had twelve children spanning forty years. Married at 16 and a mother at 17, she ran a line camp for loggers, feeding them, caring for their needs while caring for more than 6 children at the same time in an old and very poor mountainous are of West Virginia. She lived on the top of a mountain, burnt coal to keep warm, fed her kids from baking she did on a wood stove in the kitchen, baking her bread in the same way. Electricity was not run to her high mountain top home until the mid fifties. Can you imagine raising twelve children in those conditions? Yet I never saw her home less than spotless and never tasted food so good as she cooked.

Surely she deserves more than a three line bio?

Your own parents and grandparents have a story to tell.When you read their bios, go a step further and really think about what they went through. Add up the information in the bio’s that you read about our wonderful and stalwart pioneer women from all areas, and really take into consideration what they went through this Mothers Day.

And then… call your mother.

The United States Traditions of Easter, those things we do each year, quite often without thinking about it, are hold overs from other countries, whose Easter, or springtime traditions we brought with us when those ancestors boarded the boats to come to the United States from their place of birth.

In the US, we quite typically hide our childrens baskets, color and hunt for Easter Eggs, and wait for an Easter Bunny to bring them goodies for their baskets. Where did those traditions come from? Are they Christian faith traditions, or that of a pagan race, somewhere down the line, or are they not of a religious nature, but that of a race of people?

The answer is, of course, a bit of both. Our religious beliefs give us some of the traditions of Easter that we celebrate and remember, while our race, or our country of origination gives us another aspect of it, much like christmas or any other holiday that we celebrate.

Dying Easter Eggs–
Where did this tradition come from? The origination of of Easter egg coloring is supposed to have been begun long before the advent of Easter per se, about 3000 BC and it isn’t known for sure if it began with the Keltoi or the Persians, both of whom celebrated the first day of spring. The egg was a symbol of fertility and dying them bright colors made it that much more festive we have to assume.

The first time we know that Easter Eggs were dyed in the US was in the early part of the 1700, when the Pennsylvania Duth, or German settlers began to do it, using materials such as skins of onions and tree bark to color the eggs.

The Easter Bunny

The Easter Bunny is certainly nothing that is a modern day invention and has in fact been with us since long before the Easter holiday.
THe symbol of the Easter Rabbit began many centuries ago, with a pagan festival, Yostre, or some say, with the celebration of a festival for the Goddess Eastre, who was worshipped by Anglo Saxons through a symbol , the rabbit.

Today we dye our eggs, hunt our baskets, and celebrate with the Easter Bunny.
what traditions did your own ancestors have in their original countries?
Can you think of anything we left out?
Leave us a comment about your own Easter Traditions.

Sending out letters, requesting assistance and paying for it, or traveling to international destinations to search for ourselves,  all cost a reasonable amount to accomplish and some of us weren’t able to actively track down people using those methods.

The internet with its plethora of information, allows us the luxury of viewing a passenger list, a slave ship manifest or a birth and death certificate, a marriage certificate or property lists on line, but many of those have their price as well.

There are however, several really good repositories of infofrmation that you can avail yourself of, without a cost, and get started, or even completed, in your quest for your ancestors or someone elses.

The best of the best, so far as free internet sites which house important genealogy information, those sites which did it for the joy of it instead of the profit are listed below for your convenience:

USGenWeb Project: Housing not only databases of information, such as birth and marriage certificates, Social security information and other projects, but also a forum to interact with others who are seeking the same people you are.Gen Web

Great Britain and Ireland Emigration Passenger Lists–those passengers who traveled to Australia as free citizens.Passenger Lists

Passenger Ship Transcribers GuildMore than 9000 free passenger lists to help you pinpoint your ancestors, all in ten volumes. Also special projects all of which are free to the genealogical community.Ships Lists/Transcribers Guild

Ancestor search–Offering multiple free services, including passenger ships to Pennsylvania.Ancestor search

Rootsweb--Free bio’s, searchable by county or state, and much more information to help you find your ancestors.Roots web

The list will be ongoing, edited to remove dead links and filling up more and more as we find more and more good sites to offer you. If you find a dead link on our list or know of a great resource that is completely and totally free, give us a heads up please…