How Your Famly Came
About
Your family's history is part of your history too. Perhaps learning
more about your family will inspire you to be a different person today. Or, perhaps your quest will
help open the door to questions that you may have. For others, a quest into their family ancestry is
one that will provide them with the tools to pass down information to their own children and then their
grandchildren as well. Genealogy is something to strive for.
The quest to learn more about your family is something that people have wanted to
know and learn for hundreds of years. The need to know about who, what, where, and when is powerful and
virtually any person can relate to wanting more information about their past, whether it's their own or their
ancestors.
Our quest to learning your genealogy is a long one and it will take some
work. There's nothing simple or easy about the process of unearthing years of history. Yet, the
reward that will come from it is a reward that will fulfill your history craving for knowledge. Use this
site to help you to begin your quest.
Why You Need To Explore Your Past
It seems simple to understand why history is important. There are countless
times that history repeats itself. We are face with the same choices that we were just a handful of years
ago. Did we learn from our mistakes or will we make the same ones over and over again?
Whether you believe in a Higher Power or not, there is still the question of what
could have happened to those that are in your past. After all, don't you want to know who was in your
family tree?
Could you be the descendant of one of the Kings or Queens of England?
Perhaps you have an ancestor that was a war hero in the Revolutionary War. Perhaps the past isn't as
pretty with ancestors that died in famines, illnesses or strife, only to save their children that you would
eventually come from.
The "what if" type questions are out there and people in general are curious
about what it means for them. If you want to know what your chances of learning more about your past you
have to give genealogy a chance. You have to try to learn more.
The good news is that it's quite possible for many people to learn more about
those in their family
trees. The quest starts with understanding the process of genealogy and then learning how to
get started on your own journey to learn as much as you can about those that have come before you in your
family
tree.
Defining Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of family ancestry. It is
the study and tracing of the family's pedigrees. During the process of genealogy, you will collect the
names of your relatives, including those that are deceased and will then establish their relationship to each
other.
This will include exploring various levels of your family tree as well including
primary and secondary family members. You will use both documentation and word of mouth to help you to
develop your family tree. The goal is to ultimately build a family tree that includes all of your
relatives as far back as you would like to take it, or at least as far as you can take it.
Getting a family history of your
family is a bit different. In genealogy, you technically only will get the names of your family
members, creating a tree.
But, with a family history, you will take this one step farther by including
information about each of those people. Learning more about the lives they lived is part of getting your
family history.
Sometimes, this can be done at the same time as creating a family tree, other
times it is a bit more complex because of how difficult it can be to learn this information. The goal is
to gather as much information about your ancestors as you can to better understand your family's history in
both public and private life.
The Genealogist
One of the many people that you may find at your side during the process of
understanding your family history is that of your genealogist. A Genealogist is someone that does the
work of genealogy, rather he or she collects the data that is later used to piece together family trees and
family histories.
If you use a professional genealogist to track your family's history, you will
hire them to do several key things for you. They will work to uncover your past.
Their job is to get as many oral histories and preserve your family's history as
much as possible. They do this first through living relatives that you have. Then, they push
through various tools to gain information on your ancestors, those that are no longer alive.
The genealogist works to understand as much as possible about those that they are
uncovering. This often means more than just knowing their names, but also learning about their lifestyle,
their motivations in their lives and even piecing together a biography for the family.
The benefit of using a genealogist for your study of your own family tress is
that they have experience (or should at least!) in the process. This means that they have the necessary
information to work through old laws, political boundaries that were once in place, immigration trends and
historical information to find the answers to your family tree's questions.
Yet, you don't have to use a genealogist for your journey into your family's
past. You can gain information about your family in a number of ways. While it may be easier for
you to hand over your family's information and let someone else do the work, this can be costly.
There is also the need for doing your own exploring of information about your
family. Many people go through the journey through learning about their family by exploring the details
that are out there, gathering facts and understanding the lives that these people lived. That unique
experience of uncovering information and learning from your ancestor's past is one journey you may want to do
on your own.
The good news is that there is a lot of help for those that are considering a
search through their family history available right on the web. You don't have to go through the process
on your own and ending up hitting a dead-end that makes you give up.
You can use a number of excellent tools that are available to you on the
web. It is completely up to you to determine the right road to take through the process of uncovering
your family tree. In fact, in later chapters we'll talk about tools of software that you can use
too.
But, we'll assume here that you do want to do this journey on your own or you
want further information. For that, let's explore the process of
genealogy.
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