New here - starting over on family records to verify

[csziggy]

I've been on Du a while and now that the bloom is off, I am back to a family tradition - tracing family lines. Much of the work has been done for me. My father's mother was big into DAR and traced many lines back to the Revolution. When Mom married in, she had to prove that her side was just as good and ended up with more Revolutionary ancestors than Grandmother had! Then my oldest sister got involved, and found more ancestors.

BUT since all that was done, I have read that some of the DAR sources were found to be inaccurate. And some of what Grandmother had, we do not have the actual source info on. Mom was pretty good - she based most of hers directly on wills, birth, marriage and death certificates, tombstones and such. But some was from books on some of the family lines. My sister compiled a number of the family Bibles into a book with {bad} copies of the entries and transcriptions of most of them.

So now I am planning to go back through and gather source materials to verify all our lines. And since they all were mostly into getting DAR lines, they mostly stopped at the Revolution. Very little has been taken back farther, unless it was in some book or research done by other people.

And then there is my father's father's line - it goes back to Wales. We have a history of the family - big tome. But it is in Welsh!

I have not worked with this stuff for many years, but I spent much of my childhood traipsing around cemeteries with Mom, making rubbings of the stones. Or helping her decipher wills and other old documents from bad photocopies and learning to type on ancient manual typewriters by transcribing those documents.

So - is Footnote.com worth paying money to get copies of documents or should I spend my money getting copies from the original sources where possible?

How much can I do without traveling all over?

[Rosie1223]

1. You can do a lot on the internet for free without traveling all over.

Many counties have free access to vital records indexes online. I did research for years before I felt I had exhausted all the free info and bought a subscription to Ancestry.com.

Before you subscribe take a tour of what each site has to offer -- Footnote has a lot of military records I found helpful. If you need those, maybe buy month and see what you find. You can search for free. If you find good results it will be cheaper to subscribe than to pay for individual copies, and faster too.

I found the census records on Ancestry to be helpful tracking my folks across the country, saves time if you know what county your people lived in to search for vital records, particularly if they have a common surname. However, Ancestry has many transcribed indexes not actual scanned documents so you will still have to order original sources in many cases. I believe there a free trials for ancestry.com too. (just watch out for the automatic credit card enrollment).

Your local library may have free access to Heritage Quest. Some offer remote access with your library card info. Check there too.

Good Luck!

[csziggy]

2. Thanks! I hit some sites last night

But despite entering exact info, I kept getting returns that were too general. I'll have to figure out how to keep the focus narrow to search more efficiently.

Right now, I am just trying to get a handle on what I already have. Some is in PAF, much is not. And there are few notes on sources in those files. At least most of the families did not move around much - I can spend a lot of time looking for stuff in Perry County, Alabama, in Escanaba, Michigan, and in upper state New York until the lines go back to colonial times and back to Europe.

I'll check to see what our library has to offer - may not be much since they are woefully underfunded. Perhaps the State Archives will have more but they are harder to get to. The local LDS may be worth visiting but I don't trust their sources.

If I plan it right, I can get together everything I need to look up and spend a month on Ancestry and another month on Footnotes and get scads done at once!

I'd like to make progress before my Mom passes. She'll be 89 this year and it would be great to have her help with some of the research, even if it is just finding out what she already has.

[goclark]

7. Tape your Mom

and any other relatives.

It's great to ac tually ask them questions and have the answers forever.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. You can do quite a lot without travelling, actually

I'd recommend seeing if ancestry.com is available through your local library (it often is) or if there's an LDS Family History Centre near you. Ancestry has the US census back to 1790 and digitised records for marriages, births and deaths for several states. The quality of the info available varies greatly by state; for some states, birth and death certificate images are available. The census is always a good starting point, but it can be hard to use it to trace back further than 1850 (as 1840 and earlier censuses listed only the heads of households and number of people resident in each). Probate court records for many states are also available, in some cases back to the colonial era. If you manage to trace any of your ancestors further, back to the British Isles, the LDS website (www.familysearch.org) is useful; their International Genealogical Index includes searchable transcriptions of parish registers for marriages, baptisms and deaths for England, Wales and Scotland (back to the 1500's for parts of England). The International Genealogical Index info from parish register transcriptions is much more useful than the main LDS database; be wary of information 'submitted by a member of the LDS Church' as it's very often wrong. (To access the IGI select 'advanced records search' and then 'International Genealogical Index' on the next page; you can narrow it down by region, country, and state, or in the case of Britain and Ireland by county).

[csziggy]

6. Thank you! As I said in another message, a lot more has been documented than I thought

For one side of the family most of the census has been exhausted - mostly because for the county they lived in from 1820 on, a lot of the records were lost, probably during the Civil War. There are some dead ends that may show up in other area census, but I am still finding out where the real holes are.

And both sides pretty much did little research past when the families came over to the US, so the Internal Genealogical Index will be a big help. Mostly we know roughly where they came from - the German Palitinates, the Welsh, the Scot-Irish, etc. So I should be able to hunt them down. The hard part will be narrowing some of the families down to make sure they are our own family - Morgans in Wales are far too common!

[pkdu]

4. Before you start spending money.....

Go to your local LDS Family History Library ...its free , and no need /pressure to be member of the church.

Go to http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp and lookup your local center...they have free Ancestry.com membership on their computers...and many other resources.

Cheers
P

[csziggy]

5. Thanks - I may need them to get some of the source books

It turns out that I already have copies of much of what I need, or source listings with page numbers, though some of those I don't have copies of the actual pages, just notes from them. I've been spending time entering all the sources for each link and what has been done is very impressive. But I've also found that for some of the places there were dead ends, newer books have come out that fill some of the holes. LDS has them, but I don't know if any of the other libraries I have access to have them. So that will be useful.

There is a LDS center in town, but I may wait until summer to visit. They are almost on campus and it will be easier access when the classes are smaller. Of course, I need to check on how long it takes to request materials - I may need to do that sooner!

I had forgotten how much narrative my grandmother had put together - descriptions and life histories of her parents, grandparents and in some cases, great-grandparents. In addition, she had stories about other parts of the family history. I'm almost wondering if this could be a book sized project - real book, not one of the little Kinko's copy shop type deals. A friend is a published author, I may ask her to look it over.