My aunt researched my fathers side of the family almost 35 years ago. Traced them back to a village in Holland.
I’ve been working on my maternal side of the family for the past few weeks. I’ve printed off a stack of paper from familysearch.org
I got both sides of my maternal family. lets call them the Jones and Smiths. Mr Jones married Miss Bessie Smith. They are my great grandparents. Lela Jones was a daughter from that family.
Then Lela Jones married Mr. Brown. The browns are my example maternal grandparents. Betty Brown-Adams is my mom.
I found some info on all three families. Jones, Smith and Brown.
I’m ready to buy the ancestry software and start filling in the tree.
Should I do one tree for the entire family? Or three trees? I’m having trouble figuring out how to make one tree.
I know very little about the Jones family. We have a family cemetery for the Smiths. I know a lot about them. I also have a fair amount on the Browns and they have a family cemetery.
Bob Jones…Bessie Smith
…
…Charles & Lela Brown
…
…Betty
…
…Me
If you are using Windows, you can start out with PAF for free. If you don’t like it or find a commercial product you want to pay for, you can export a GEDCOM from PAF.
One big tree is going to be the best. This way if you ever find common relatives then you only need to do them once. I started with two trees, one for my father and one for my mother. I recently combined them.
I’d also start off with PAF, I have found it to do most everything, and it’s free. I also went with Family Tree Maker, but after a few years I found so many problems that I ended up dumping them and going with Roots Magic. FTM looks slick, but isn’t as good IMO.
I will also tell you right now, and you should be used to it from the boards, cite EVERYTHING. Make sure you make some sort of citation for everything that you find, names, dates, anything. At some point, if you keep up with it, you’re going to say, where the hell did I find that?! Best to start now and not have to go back through all of it at a later date. This also includes when someone else tells you something, cite who said it and when.
Also enter every fact that you find. You’ll find multiple dates for many people, especially when you get back even 100 years. I have 4-5 dates for my great grandmother’s birth. You’ll never know which one is really correct so it’s best to list them all.
You do one tree for your entire family. Once you see the program, it’s very intuitive, and will provide the proper links between the different relatives. There are fields that you fill in with names and vital statistics, and a place to enter source citations. You can export individual trees (like the “Browns”) as “reports” from a drop-down menu if you wish. This is handy for sending select information to somebody instead of sending the entire family tree, which can number in the thousands. FTM will neatly arrange as many generations as you want to show, organize them from oldest to youngest (or vice versa) and include whatever information about the individuals that you want it to show. It allows you to exclude living relatives, if you so wish.
You can upload your family tree anytime to Ancestry. Other people may use it for information or download it and merge it with their own family tree (if they’re using Family Tree Maker. As a member, you can download other peoples’ trees and do the same.
It appears to me from this and other threads that you have considerable confusion as to the process, and as to the methods of search. I would strongly recommend that you either take an online course in genealogy research (I believe some of them are even free), or see if any are offered by your local genealogy society, or find some decent books online or in your local library. If you don’t, you’re likely to further confuse yourself, learn very poor habits that are difficult to break, and remain unaware of searchable databases and sources that could help you immensely. I floundered around in the dark for quite awhile before finally getting on track, but my paper files (which take up an entire filing cabinet drawer) are still a mess, and my source citations are less than could be hoped for. There are a lot of tricks for finding missing ancestors, especially on the female lines, but learning them by hit or miss is going to be frustrating.
Right now I’m rushing to get as much information from my mom as possible. She grew up and often visited my great-grandmother and her brothers & sisters. For her that was her grandmother and great aunts. I never knew that generation of the family. I need to get that oral history before its too late. I lost dad seven months ago. It’s driven home that my mom won’t be available for questions that much longer. She’s the last one left. All mom’s sisters are gone. Grandmother is gone. I’ve lost most of my family in the past 20 years.
With moms help we’ve found my great-grandmothers family in the 1900 census. Mom has confirmed the names of all the brothers & sisters. From there I found each one on the 1920 and 30 census as they married and had kids. It’s pretty cool to see the progression in their lives over 30 years.
Mom was born in 1932 and at that time these people were in their late 20’s and early 30’s. She really got to know them well. We’ve even got a box of b&w photos of some of them.
I’ll look into a genealogy class. That would help a lot to take the next steps and trace back into the 1800’s. Our family cemetery may help some in confirming a few of those names. But, anything before 1850 would strictly be research. No one in the cemetery lived before then.
While you’re getting family history, don’t neglect middle names. In older generations, people sometimes either gave their kids a family surname as a middle name (I’m an example), or substituted their maiden name for their middle name; my mother’s middle name was Margaret. When she got married, she dropped the Margaret and started using Saunders, which was her maiden name. I didn’t find out what her middle name really was until I found a copy of her marriage license. Be suspicious of names like “Midge”, “Nellie”, and other unusual names. They’re usually pet names held over from childhood or nicknames. I have an ancestor named Nellie Gray. Her real name was Ellen Jane Gray; you don’t want to know how long it took me to find that out.
Get places lived and dates they lived there. That helps with the census. When you enter a name in the search engine, the census results will turn up not only the heads of households but will also cross-index childrens’ names in the results, i.e., if the father’s name was Jim Brown, and the person you’re looking for was his daughter, Mary Brown, if you type in “mary brown”, you will still get a hit as a member of the household and it will list the father, mother and any other siblings. But it’s really important to know where they lived at that time, particularly for a common name.
Don’t trust Mom’s memory. My older sister likes to try to help, but she has a memory like a steel colander. She’s almost always wrong. Ask if there are any letters from relatives that you can read and copy. They often hold bits of important information, and if the envelope is still there, it will have a return address. I found a first cousin just three years ago, who I didn’t know even existed. He had a couple of old letters written by my father (who I never new) to his sister (my cousin’s mother). It gave me some real insight as to who he was and where he worked at the time.
Well, this can all turn into a very long narrative, if we let it. Good luck in your search.
One thing I have to decide is which family names to put the effort into researching. I may just stop with my great grandmother’s mom & dad’s family names. Once I get the people my mom knew documented that may be good enough. They are pretty far removed from my current families heritage.
I definitely want to put my energies into my grandfathers, fathers family. That will be the first family I research in any depth.
When we had to bring our family trees “as far back as you can go” (1), the teacher had thought we’d need one or two sheets of paper per student; mine is split in two, with the paternal side taking 8 sheets of paper and the maternal side “only” four. Given the amount of children Mormon families can have, I imagine their software can deal with the equivalent of “sticking another paper on the side”.
1: the outlander teacher hadn’t encountered Navarrese family trees before; we’d all been reasonable and stopped c. 1700
Agree! Milk your oldest living relatives for everything they can recall but if the records throw up something they swear is wrong, agree with them and quietly pursue it on your own. Even when your elderly relatives are steel-trap sharp, they don’t know if they’re passing along lies/half-truths/misunderstandings from others.
An example: elderly cousin praised our great grandfather up hill and down dale, passing along all the stories her grandmother had told her about what a virtuous, honest, trustworthy and highly regarded man he was. I kept my mouth shut, but I’d seen his transportation record… he was a convict, sentenced to 7 years in the penal colony for petty theft. One day, elderly cousin veered off on a different track. “His brother, though, he was a different kettle of fish! He was a convict you know! Stole a watch…”, and suddenly the penny dropped. Someone had switched the lives of the brothers around when passing on the aural history of the family and Convict Richard’s descendants were being told he was the sainted free settler while his brother John was the dodgy one!
Also…when you’re researching things, don’t forget that sometimes names have alternative spellings (Brawn for Brown, for example) and they can still be correct. I’ve encountered this several times in my own research…I have a great aunt named Phoebe who in some documents is listed as Pheba. Sometimes when census takers were writing down names, they didn’t know how to spell them and so they spelled them the way they sounded.
I don’t know how you would do that. Family expands exponentially, and I don’t know how you would limit your research. The only way I limit it is to not go into ancillary lines too deeply. If an ancestor had a child, I’ll note that child’s wife, but not pursue that wife’s ancestry if it isn’t in my blood line. Far-flung cousins are really not of much interest, either. I have a stepfather, but only followed his family back a few generations, and that was mostly cribbed from someone else who is researching that same line. Some people are into the numbers game, and claim to have 10-20 thousand names on file. My database is up to about 3,000 after 15 years, and is unwieldy enough as it is.
SticksAndString: Name changes can be a problem. Simple names like Brown and Smith can either be of British or German origin. Brown can be Braun, Smith could be Schmidt. I have a family name that morphed from Glaeveke to Glafke. After 15 years I’ve still not figured out my grandmother’s last name. It’s generally listed as Brushard, but she was from Germany and that’s not a German name. I’ve tried looking for endless variations such as Borchard, Broschard, Bruckhardt, etc. No luck. Her tree remains a frustrating blank.