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.