Researching Your Family History – Don’t Re-Invent The Wheel!
Another basic principle of family history is not to re-invent the wheel. You should not assume that you are the first person to have traced your family history. It may be that someone else currently researching the same family, or uncle Bert who did the family history in the 1960’s, solved the problem that has currently brought your research to a stop.
Contacting others who are researching your family history has become increasingly easy with the Net. There are a number of sites, both free and paid, where people can advertise their research interests to others. Two of the largest of these are Rootsweb’s World Connect (www.rootsweb.com) and Genes Reunited (www.genesreunited.com).
The World Connect project is a free service. It boasts almost 5 million surnames, provided by researchers from around the world. The useful feature of World Connect, apart from it being free, is that the contact email address of the person who contributed their research is provided once a successful search is completed.
Genes Reunited is a paid service. The current subscription is a modest $19.95 for one year’s access to its database. In this case, the contributor’s contact details are hidden. After you successfully find a common ancestor, the site prompts you to send an email to the contributor, but you don’t get to see their contact details until they are willing to provide them to you. Up to that point, you basically use the Genes Reunited as a postbox and it delivers the mail backwards and forwards between subscribers!
The great feature of both of these sites is that you are able to do searches in a number of different ways. The flexibility can help you overcome some problems you may have encountered in your research.
For example, one of the problems in tracing female ancestors is establishing a maiden surname. You may have found the baptism of your ancestor, Thomas hills, son of John and Mary in 1780 at Ryarsh in Kent, England, but Mary’s maiden name is not provided on the church baptismal register. Unless you are able to trace the marriage of John and Mary, Mary’s maiden name and further research on that line is fairly much at a dead end.
Using both World Connect and Genes Reunited, you are able to estimate birth years and do searches for people just by given name and area without having to specify other details such as surname. Fir example, we could do a search for all people with the given name Mary born in Ryarsh between the years we think she may have been born. This may well see you on the way to finding ‘your’ Mary, as other researchers may already know from different sources that ‘their’ Mary Bowden married Thomas Hills in Ryarsh.
Don’t forget, too, the power of Google. Many family historians around the world have their own Web sites where they’ve published details of their research. Just putting the name of one of your problematic ancestors into Google and hitting the search button, may help you find a distant cousin who has built a Web site that features ancestors you have in common. Simply type in your ancestor’s name in quotation marks (for example, “John Packman”) followed by the search term genealogy or family history and/or the name of the place that you know that person lived. So, your whole search string may look something like: “John Packman” genealogy. Such a search instantly produces a list of Web sites containing information on the family history of someone called John Packman.
Increasingly, these days, social networking sites are also being used by family historians to get in touch with others who have similar research interests. The most popular of these is Facebook (www.facebook.com). While you first have to register (for free) before being able to use the site, once you’ve done so, you are well on your way to discovering people with the same surname as the one you’re looking for. Increasingly, too, there are a number of Facebook pages dedicated to getting everyone with the same surname together as a group within the site. For example, there is a Stieger Facebook page where anyone with that surname (or an interest in it) can join and be hooked up with others of the same name or interests. There is also an increasing number of Facebook groups that concentrate on one specific town or region, and this can be another place to find others with common research interests.
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