It can be intimidating to start working on the genealogy of your family. The sheer amount of data you would need to track down, gather, and make sense of can feel really overwhelming to a new genealogist. Before you start wondering about just how many hours you will be required to devote to your new obsession.. I mean hobby… you need to understand something. You probably know more about your relatives and ancestors than you think you do.
People who are new to something tend to make the kind of mistakes that are not made by those who have a few years of expertise. This is true of genealogy as well. Sometimes, the way of becoming skilled at a particular hobby is to make those kinds of mistakes, so that you can learn from them. It’s not unheard of for a brand new genealogist to assume that he or she knows absolutely nothing about their relatives or ancestors, and to lament that they have no idea where to begin researching that.
In reality, you do know at least a few things about your relatives. You just don’t realize that you know so much information about them. You don’t necessarily have to have an exact idea of when an important event, like a birth, death or marriage, took place in order to be able to connect that information to your family tree. New genealogists might overlook some resources that can, potentially, hold the information that the genealogist is seeking.
One way to figure out when an event took place is to think about the circumstances surrounding that event. I can remember that one of my grandmothers died when I was either six or seven years old. If I think about it, I can pull the year of her death out of that information. I remember that it was right around Mother’s Day that year, which puts her day of death sometime in May. I know how old my mother was when I was born, and so I can work backwards and determine what year she was born. You can probably do this kind of approximation in order to pin down details about at least a few of your relatives.
What religion was your ancestor? Some religions keep careful records of important information like birth and death dates, and the day a marriage took place. If you have a good guess about where your ancestor lived, you may be able to locate a church archive that holds some information about your family.
Where did your ancestor grow up? While a lot of people live and die someplace near where they were born, this isn’t true for everyone. If you are searching through the Social Security Death Index, and cannot find the information you are looking for, try searching the same index for a different state. These are just a few examples of directions that you can take your genealogy research, starting from the pieces of information that you already know.
Image by Ethan Lofton on Flickr