Research, Family Tree Book And Scrapbooking Tips
by Ellis Keith
As you start collecting all those interesting stories, pictures, certificates and documents you’ll likely want a way to display it all so that others can enjoy it too. One of the best ways to do that is by creating a family tree book or by scrapbooking. Most of the better genealogy programs have the ability to create a manuscript for a family tree book. Check into the different features of the best of them. Once you research family tree details and have placed an interesting selection of your family history into a scrapbook, then it’s available for other family members to browse through and look at the pictures and read the stories that are of interest to them. It is a way of both making the information available and at the same time keeping it safe and accessible.
Basically, building a scrapbook on your family tree is pretty much the same as building a scrapbook on any other topic. Choose a scrapbook that is going to be large enough to hold all of the information you’re going to be putting into it. Make sure you choose something sturdy – it’s likely to get a lot of use over the years. It is usually wise to choose a book that allows you to add pages. That way, you can add interesting new information on ancestors when you find it and after you have passed the book on to the next generation, those descendants can continue to add things of interest that they discover as they continue the legacy of your family tree. One common method of organization is to start with the pictures and documents that are the oldest.
Decide on what layout you want for your pages before you start. Then as you gather your photos, certificates, newspaper clippings, mementos, documents and anything you plan on including keep them organized according to your plan. If you’re going to put the oldest generations and their supporting pictures and documents in the first pages that is a good way to start. Make sure that each piece of information is labeled and then put in order so that it ties in with the right relatives. In little notations you can add the supporting information that makes the life of that ancestor interesting – like their occupation, where they lived and even summaries of word of mouth stories you may have picked up from older relatives or family friends. When you have been able to obtain copies of Military records, birth certificates, marriage certificates and other primary source information those would be natural items to include. It you don’t have the primary documentation for an ancestor you can still add the stories you picked up from relatives or from published family or county histories or any number of other sources. A picture of a gravestone or an old family house will often make a nice touch if you have been able to get one.
You can lay your scrapbook out where you start with you father’s side of the family and follow it from oldest ancestors down to the current time and then do the same for your mother’s side of the family. Another approach is just to keep the whole book chronological covering ancestors on both sides of the family. Which ever way you do it is fine, just be sure to make a notation as to where that individual fits in the family tree.
Which ever layout you use, be sure to follow a few common sense success tips. Make sure that each page is devoted to either one individual or to one couple. Be sure that you include an abundance of documentation so anyone looking at the book can see where the ancestor on that page fits into the family tree and what time and location they lived in.
Taking the time and care to complete this project will provide you with a heartwarming family treasure that will inspire and uplift many of your descendants for generations.
Software To Help Trace Family Tree Ancestors
by Ellis Keith
Growing your family tree is fun and rewarding but you soon gather so much information that you need a good system to keep it all organized. One of the best ways to trace family tree ancestors is to use one of the great computer software programs that are available. Two of the best programs for both the novice and the serious or professional genealogist that are available to help find family trees are: Family Tree Maker by Ancestry.com and RootsMagic. Although I am going to review Family Tree Maker in this article, Roots Magic is an excellent, easy to use and yet powerful program that offers a free version and you should not make the software decision without looking into it carefully. In fact it is the software I have on my own personal computer. Check it out here http://www.rootsmagic.com/
When deciding on what genealogy software you want to help you trace your family tree and track ancestors, you want something that will give you good value for what you pay and that will serve your needs now and into the foreseeable future. Ancestry.com is a huge website with extensive resources and they have developed what is likely the most commonly used software by genealogist hobbyists – Family Tree Maker.
Family Tree Maker can be found here: www.familytreemaker.com and it is one of the best and very robust. This software comes with a number of very useful features. With it you can save and organize your videos, photographs and audio clips. You can also help see everything in perspective with its timeline, various reports and charts as well as the central feature – the family tree or ancestral (pedigree) charts. Another important feature it has (which is a must in any program you use) is its ability to easily exchange information with other sites and researchers.
Because this program is developed by Ancestry.com, it is easy to exchange information with them and use them together. Rootsweb and many other sites available (with an easy internet search) allow you to connect to them and download and save important information they have on their sites that you wish to collect and save in your own genealogy program.
Printing out professional looking history books or large posters of your family tree are among the strong features of Family Tree Maker. With a little investment of time and effort, you can create attractive keepsakes that will have lasting interest to you and your extended family for decades to come.
One of the standard features of all good family tree software is that it allows you to enter information one person at a time. This software contains what I would consider all the basic features needed in a genealogy program. Once and individual is added, you can then add the details about each of the many points of their history. Important dates and locations where events took place can then be added to their profile one at a time – including birth, christening, marriage, divorce, death and burial information as well as other detail about them you may want to include.
When you find family tree building success and enter information about where an individual lived, the Family Tree Maker software can show you where they lived with a map. There is also another valuable feature this program has. It allows you to publish a website online of your family tree so that other family members and distant relatives can see it and tie into it from their own family trees. For many genealogy enthusiasts, the idea of sharing the family tree and history is one of the most rewarding parts of the hobby.
While Family Tree Maker is very feature rich, it also comes at a price. Though not too expensive for most hobbyists, many of the less expensive or even free programs can do most of the same things. There is a free program called Family Tree Builder that is available from MyHeritage.com. Another basic and long time favorite and likely the most popular of all the free or inexpensive programs is Personal Ancestral File available for download from Familysearch.com in the download area here: PAF 5.2
Family Tree Builder is available here: www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder . This is a great program for free but it is important to remember that you are not going to get all the nice features and “bells and whistles” with the free ones that are available with those that require more of an investment. Check out your options, and if you can afford to go with one of the better software programs that require an investment I would recommend you do that as you are likely involved in a legacy building process that will last the rest of your life. Whatever else you may do, have fun and happy family tree sleuthing!
Sample Family Tree Building Forms and Templates
by Ellis Keith
Who else has felt the pull of finding their family tree but feeling like the process might be a little overwhelming? Sometimes the family trees we’ve seen seem to be so complex that they’re hard to understand and we wonder if we could ever create one. Relax! Growing your family tree is easy when you use sample family tree forms and follow simple steps and a proven format.
Once you have identified the names and vital dates about your relatives, you might be wondering how to go about putting them in an organized way into a family tree that is easy to read and understand. It helps if you use a good example of someone else’s family tree as a guide. There are some sites on the internet that give you both examples and templates to use in constructing your own family tree. These templates make it easy to know where to put your own information, then your parents and each of the subsequent ancestors on your tree … as far back as you have names and information.
If you are just trying to put together a family tree to impress someone or out of a sense of obligation or even to give to a relative as a gift, then you might choose to have a professional genealogist build your family tree for you. There are a number of online websites where your can just send them the names and pictures of your ancestral relatives and they’ll charge you a fee and create a professional and impressive looking family tree.
That choice will indeed get the job done, but having someone else create your family masterpiece takes much of the fun out of it.
A lot of the fun in doing genealogy is in personally gathering and discovering the names and places about your ancestors. By going to google.com and doing a search, you can find a number of sites on the web that offer free templates for your ancestral chart (commonly referred to as a pedigree chart), and charts for recording the details of each family (commonly called Family Group Sheets). One site in that category that has a number of sample genealogy forms available to download is:
http://obituarieshelp.org/genealogy_forms_downloads.html The family tree chart has spots to put each individuals name, to whom they were married and when, as well as both birth and death information – both dates and places. This is one of the critical forms to use in the research process. It helps you keep your information organized, is easy to use for adding new information and gives a quick summary at a glance of what you have gathered so far.
Some of the other family tree templates may be fancier and more decorative but they still accomplish the same results. One of the sites that offers some sample family tree forms that are more elaborate is : http://www.thetreemaker.com/samples/family-tree-example.html This site offers differ options to choose from and most of them can make the resulting personal family tree both functional and visually impressive.
Another good site that offers a good free family tree template is:
http://genealogy.about.com/od/free_charts/ig/genealogy_charts/family_tree.htm They also have other forms to make your research easier here when building your family tree. They offer a number of different designs for your tree chart and one of the great things about these charts is that they can be filled out right there on the computer and then printed out. That feature can be particularly valuable to those with poor handwriting.
There’s at least one other good site that is worthy of mention in this brief article and that is: http://www.familytreemagazine.com/freeforms They have quite a good selection of charts and work sheets that can make your sleuthing a lot easier and more fun as you track down those elusive ancestors. Another reason to check out this site is that they have a good magazine that has a lot of information about different ways and places to proceed with researching your family tree.
So get started with your next step today. Often time involving the younger relatives helps them get a sense of who they are and ties them to the family unit and reinforces family values. Gather the clan or see them one by one but certainly, put a smile on your face, a twinkle in your eye and go find another branch on your own family tree today!
How to Find My Family Tree The Easy Way
Researching Your Family Tree
by Ellis Keith
Who else has ever wondered: How do I find my family tree? Discovering your family tree can be fun and easy and it isn’t as hard as you might think. It all starts with yourself. To grow a healthy family tree is like a game, it takes a little time and a little energy but can be very fun, rewarding and a relationship building experience.
Learning the history of your family starting with yourself and your closest relatives is really quiet easy. Start with the oldest relatives that are living and able and willing to talk with you about the family. You’ll want to get the full names and as much of the birth and death information as you can about your grandparents, your great grandparents and as far back as you can from these living relatives.
When gathering this information remember to get the important maiden names of the women in marriages as well as any names and dates that you can, pertaining to the children in each family. The names of the children can be particularly valuable in identifying the fact that you have the correct family when you are researching things like census records or wills. At some point, your living relatives will not have any more information so you need as much as possible to help you with the actual researching once you start it. Get as much detailed information as you can as far back as you can.
When talking to folks and later when researching, try and find out all you can about where the people lived and what dates they were there. This adds interest as well as giving you clues in the event that you have to dig deeper into county or court records. When talking to your relatives, be sure to see if they have any written documents or old photos too. The documents like birth, marriage, divorce, adoption and death certificates have obvious value but the pictures might reveal important information as well.
Often a photograph will have a date on or notes about the event (like a wedding) or even the names of siblings and relatives that are also in the picture. If you have a picture from a trip when someone visited relatives or a marriage for example, you will often get a point of reference for you to figure out other import events or relationships. When you have found all you can about your family history by talking with all the living relatives or friends of the family that you are able to find, it will be time to move on to exploring other information sources.
Now that we live in the age of the internet, we have an abundant number of ways and sources for growing our family trees and uncovering more family history. Most of the websites will require you to register with them in order to use their resources. Some of the good sites are free but many of them require at least a small fee. Some of the web sites with extensive information databases are more expensive but often they will let you test them out for free for a short period of time. Some of the expensive ones are available at your local libraries or at the closest ( free for anyone to use ) Family History Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Find them in the phonebook or online.
These large database sites usually contain both searchable indexes as well as digitized images of important documents and public records. Some of these indispensable resources are things like census records from 1790 to 1930 (and soon 1940) in the USA, birth and death records, parish and cemetery records, military records and many more.
Many of the free websites offer great information but it is usually in a narrow field of research. For example the website www.findagrave.com can be a wonderful resource for finding death information but it is of no help with things like census indexes and images or marriage records.
As a general rule, if you are just getting started or are a casual genealogical hobbyist, use the free sites and the libraries may be the best way to go. When you become more involved or serious about extending the branches on your family tree, if you can afford it, you’ll likely want to join one or more of the fee based genealogy information sites. In either case, it is an exciting time to be researching your family tree as there is so much help and so many resources available. Take it one person or family at a time and start adding to your family tree today. Do it! My bet is that you’ll come to love it and your children and your children’s children will thank you for many generations to come.
How To Discover Ancestors – An Introduction to Family Tree Research
by Ellis Keith
Searching for your family roots or family tree is called genealogy or genealogical research. For many of us, how to discover ancestors and build our family tree as we research ancestry becomes a passion. It’s not enough just to know about ourselves from the memory our own experiences. Our own identity can be enhanced by knowing our family roots. A direct ancestor might have been a Statesman, an inventor or a preacher or just a humble school teacher with eight children to raise. All of our ancestors had some part in giving us the life that we currently have. But for most folks, other than asking a few questions of their older relatives or digging around in grandma’s attic, they just don’t know what they can do or how they should go about discovering their own family history.
These days it seems obvious that one prime source of information is going to be the internet. Fortunately information is there in great abundance. In fact, there are few things that cannot be found on the internet if you just know how and where to look. Many sites like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and Rootsweb.com specialize in providing detailed genealogical research resources for digging into the family tree. They are jam packed with many different sources of information. On these sites you can find a large array of vital records including marriage licenses and registers as well as birth and death registers, indexes and certificates. In addition, there are census records, wills, different kinds of military records, old city directories and tax information.
Once you get started on these online research sites, one of the biggest challenges is just sorting through the masses of people to find the ones that fit in your family tree. It’s amazing at times to realize how many other people had the same or similar names or birth dates as that elusive ancestor you’re looking for. The clues you have from memories and relatives about your family history are often the exact pieces of the puzzle you need to fill in the gaps. Using the online genealogy sites and doing searches on the internet search engines like google.com, yahoo.com and bing.com using the details you do have, will often lead to the exact next bit of information you are searching for. The internet puts at your fingertips a large amount of information that used to be hidden away in distant places and inaccessible archives.
Recently available resources like the records of immigration from Ellis Island in New York may help you find unknown details about your ancestor’s departure from Europe and their arrival in America. There are a variety of original handwritten records or scans of handwritten records that might also be readily available like old records from the local courthouse. In fact, even the digitized indexes that are available were transcribed from hand written records, so it’s important to remember that handwriting can be misinterpreted and many of the clerks and assistants who wrote the original records did not know how to spell correctly. When doing your research, always remember to keep this in mind and look for alternatives and variations in spelling.
Many places with original documents may be available to you close to home or with the use of the postal service. The most commonly available resource might be courthouses and libraries. Histories and vital records can often be found in these places. These vital records pertaining to births, marriages, divorces, adoptions and deaths may be found on the county level or they may be available from the State Department of Vital Statistics. The state or county often will mail you copies of these certificates as well (for a fee) if they are not close enough to visit in person. These vital records frequently contain information and clues that fill in the gaps so that you then can take the next step on the internet again. Libraries often have microfilm or digitized records of old newspapers that have obituary information that can give a lot of detail on the immediate family connection and relatives. Cemeteries (both the tomb stones and the cemetery records) can also be a great source of information about birth and death dates, alternate names, relationships and other members of the family. Online cemetery records can also be found on many sites – one of the largest being findagrave.com. Another often forgotten source of good information can be the funeral homes that were used as they often have records of spouses, children, or parents and sometimes other relatives..
For many people, one of the most rewarding aspects of having the hobby of genealogy is the sense of contribution that is gained. It is fulfilling to know that not only are you finding out many interesting stories and details about your family’s past but you are also recording and preserving this history so that it can be enjoyed by future relatives and descendants. By carefully collecting. researching and then documenting what is found, a genealogy hobbyist leaves behind a most interesting family historical legacy that will be cherished by many for generations yet to come.
