Slowly Getting Back To Genealogy

Well, I have not been keeping up on this blog like I should. I was really busy with my genealogy work before Christmas since I wanted to give my mom and grandmother something as a gift. I managed to give them a book with 4 different branches of the family history but I didn't get to put any pictures in it since I didn't have time to organize what I got from my grandmother.

I gave the books to my mom and grandmother on Christmas day and asked them to look it over and add any info they thought it needed (which I know is still a lot). I believe what I'm going to do for the pictures is just get copies of them and put them into envelopes and put them into the pockets of the 3 ring books with them labeled on the back. It will be much easier to do it this way than to try to organize the pictures on my print shop program with several pictures on one page.

The most enjoyable part of doing this project was meeting the new relatives I found through the surname forums online. All the new cousins I found had a lot of very helpful and valuable information that I would have never known about and neither would my family. I encluded copies of some of the emails I received in the back of the book so they would know I got a lot of help with this project.

My grandmother was very helpful with the pictures she let me get too. I took my new Nikon Coolpix camera that Chip got me as an early Christmas gift and took pictures of the pictures that she had which worked out pretty good. I'll post some of the pics I got from her here:





















I really love all these great old pictures my grandmother had. She had a lot more that I really need to get too. Well that's it for right now. I'll be posting more about my family book and how I put it together later.

The Visit With My Grandmother

I'm a few days late in posting this but I have not been feeling the greatest in the last few days. Anyway, the visit I had with my granmother the other day did shed some light on a few questions I had on some of the information I have previously found. Mainly, why both my great grandfather and his brother were married to what looked like the same woman. Come to find out both men were married to two different woman but with the exact same first and maiden names, but not from the same family. It was one big puzzle that I was glad to find out the truth.

Keeping information organized is very important to anyone's research. Currently, the way I am keeping mine is by taking each member of the family (right now primarily my direct line) and putting them on index cards with info on who they married and a list of their children, then I work on that branch of the family and go back as far as I can. Sometimes I work on several different members at one time, then I put them onto a rough draft in my word processing program in the proper spot with info on the web site where I got the information. This seems to work the best for me but their are many different ways that others do it as well. It is also important to store the information you have as you go, so as a precaution I usually store the info onto a SD card and I have also sent the information to my mother's computer and my sister's for them to keep and store too in case something were to happen to my computer.

My grandmother seemed to be very interested in the information I had printed out for her so far. I asked her to take time to look it over and make any corrections she thought it needed as well as to write down any information about the people she knew growing up so I could easily update the infomation later. Overall I had a great visit with her on Monday as well as my nephew who walked his dog down to vist with us while I was there. He is very much into history and reading a I hope that one day he will appreciate the information.

On the next blog: I'll discuss more about how I found my information and the importance of posting to family message boards.

Please post comments: If you have any advice or suggestions on where to find good geneological information please post a comment on this blog. Also, if you find any of my geneology information matches anything you might have in your geneology research please don't hesistate to comment and ask for any information I might be able to help you with. Thank you.

Getting Information from Elders

Hi, today I thought I would discuss a little more about how I started verifying some of the information that my uncle had provided in his family record and then go into discussing my mom's side of the family. Other than the messages boards full of people looking for the same ancestors that I was looking for I also looked through any of the census records I could get for the time period I was looking in for each person. I tended to only find basic information with this though unless I was willing to pay. The same was with the vital records site at http://www.vitalrec.com/ but I was able to access some great records for free for the state of West Virginia that did not charge http://www.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx . If you are lucky enough to stumble across a web site like this, then you can gain all kinds of valuable information. I found copies of original birth, marriage, and death records that had been scanned and placed on the site which allowed me to verify a lot of information very easily for both sides of my family since most of the recent generations were born and raised there. It is when generations that migrated from another state or even another country that I am still struggling to find credible information on.

So far, on my mother's mother side of the family I've gotten all the way back to 1763 for a William Herald who migrated from Kentucky to West Virginia but I have yet to find a free site that has the information I need for the Kentucky information. Once I started looking in the Kentucky information they want to charge which is something I'm not willing to do yet until I have done a thorough investigation to make sure i can't get it free first. I have also seen a few suggestions that he may have also been an immigrant from such places as Ireland, Scotland, England, or Germany which is something I really do want to find out but I know it is not going to be an easy road finding that kind of information. I do know for a fact though that that part of my grandmother's family is at least from Kentucky which is something that I've heard all my life; which brings me to my next point.

Talking with your elders and writing and recording what they have to say is very important. I wish so much that I had talked with my other grandparents before they died about where they came from and the relatives they knew growing up. Fortunately I still have one grandmother left who will be turning 88 yrs old this month that still has some great memories still in tact. When I talked with her a few weeks ago I got some great basic information from her about her parents and grandparents that I would have never known if I had not sat down and talked with her. As a matter of fact, I am going to go see her today to see if she has any pictures or any other information she has stored away that I may find useful in my research. I'm also going to show her what I have done so far in my research and look forward to seeing her reaction when she finds out what I've discovered. I also am hoping to get some pictures and video of her if she will allow me to do so with my new camera. That is also something that I wished I had done more of is taking pictures of my grandparents that are no longer with us. Geneology is really something that your family needs to be open enough to discuss if you are to get valuable information, as well as memories, that you can research.

Another great resource that I have found in how to research my family is the Youtube videos done by people who have great experience in the field. Something that was very surpising to me was to find these series of videos by this young girl who has been doing geneology research for quite some time already despite her young years http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCYjz611kcU I was shocked at how interested she was in the subject of geneology and how professionally she keeps her research. For some great tips on how to do the research I highly recommend watching her videos as well as any others you can find. One of the sites that she recommends using in researching is the site http://www.cyndislist.com/ which I had never heard of before watching her videos. It has a great collection of information on where you can find great information.

Also, in looking through the free message boards at ancestry.com and other sites I found my granmother's cousin who was looking for the same information I was looking for. It was very exciting once I contacted her about some of her research to find out that she was such a close relative. I was also able to find a distant cousin from my granfather's family that I have had several communications with and I look forward to finding other relatives in the future. Come to find out, my grandmother's cousin has a lot of valuable information regarding my granmother's mother's family which she said she would share with me to give to my grandmother which is something I am very excited about. The internet can be a great valuable tool now a days in finding out things about your family and the history of where you came from. Using it to find relatives you didn't even know you had and the historical records you would of had to gone miles to find just a few short decades ago has made it much easier for future generations to discover their heritage.

On the next blog: I'll discuss how my visit with my granmother went and share some other ways I found the information I have so far.

Please post comments: If you have any advice or suggestions on where to find good geneological information please post a comment on this blog. Also, if you find any of my geneology information matches anything you might have in your geneology research please don't hesistate to comment and ask for any information I might be able to help you with. Thank you.

Family History - How I Got Started

Hi my name is Nora and I am creating this blog to keep a written record of how I am tracking my family history on the web. I first became interested in my family genealogical history when my uncle created a written record of my dad's side of the family - The Davidson's - when he was in college. He took a summer off from school and took my grandfather back to West Virginia where they were from and began his research. At the time he did his research there were no personal computers and easy records to access unless you went to the actual libraries, courthouses, and other places where they keep such records. Now a days it is much easier, although there are still a lot of pitfalls that you have to overcome due to human error on records, having to pay to get some records, and just overall hard work when having to sort, scan and read countless records for hours.



Now I am absolutely by no means a professional genealogist. I was only a teenager when my uncle did his research but after reading the family report he created for his brothers and sisters, it sparked a curiosity in me about the rest of my family but I never really did anything about it until about a year ago. When I turned 40 last January, I realized that if I was going to seriously do this then I needed to get started because I was not getting any younger and I had no idea how long it would take me to do all the research. I've quickly realized that once I got started it will probably never end. I thought I would only do my direct family line but there were so many siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. that all seemed so interesting that I wanted to know more about them too.



Since my mom and dad had the only copy of the family record locked away at their home, I decided to try and find some of the information he had already found just playing around on our computer. I remembered from my uncle's research that he had traced our family to the Ulster Scots and the name of a family member that was in the civil war. The very first thing that I discovered were the family messages boards which I thought were a real God send:) All I had to do was type in a name of a distant relative I was looking for and there is usually someone else looking for that person's information too. Often times they have more information than you and are sometimes willing to share. Being polite when asking for help and having the willingness to share any info I had was a great help in getting the information I needed. Messages boards (the one's I found were mostly at ancestry.com and free) are the best way to get the intitial jump start on your research and then you can try to verify the information from there. Once I found this information, the geneology bug bit me really hard and now it has become a new hobby for me.



On the next blog: I'll discuss a little more about finding the same information that my uncle did and begin talking about how I've gathered the information on my mom's side of the family.



Please post comments: If you have any advice or suggestions on where to find good geneological information please post a comment on this blog. Also, if you find any of my geneology information matches anything you might have in your geneology research please don't hesistate to comment and ask for any information I might be able to help you with. Thank you.