by Carole Meisenhelter

Created on: March 24, 2010

Have you gotten on the treadmill, searching for your ancestors?  How many times have you typed their name into a Google search?  Sometimes you “get lucky” and pick up valuable data, but oftentimes it’s an ongoing process of repetitive research within various genealogical websites.

Reading through census records, birth, marriage and death records, WW1 and WW2 records, we are so fortunate in this day to have easy access, right at our fingertips from our home pc’s.  Or, you can go to some libraries which may have customer access to computers, books and cd’s.  Sometimes on a given day of a week or month, with the opportunity of a genealogical historian to offer assistance to help you find your answers.

Building up your family tree can become a totally absorbing recreation; whilst building the family tree, it becomes rather like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together.  Hours spent on family research can unfold some extremely interesting facts.  Did you know that grandfather came from York?  Had you known that his first name was Wyndham (when relatives had only spoken of him as Bob)?  Did you know there was a convict in the family line? 

Not only does new-found data make you feel as though you have accomplished a great deal, but it also has to be very helpful to generations beyond.  You have done the intruiging ‘hard-yards’ and helped put together a wonderful port-folio of your family history. 

Top of the list of valuable items in genealogy research, has to be photographs.  Some may be sepia, others black and white, some will be torn around the edges or badly creased.  Anyone who searches for  family history won’t really care about the aged etching on photos of days gone by.  They’re just always extremely thankful that there is a photo at all.   

Photos can show us what our great-grandmother looked like.  Now you know why you have jowls on your chine line; thanks to Martha!  Just look at the hat she wore too, with long ‘wraps’ hanging down, no doubt to tie around her neck when riding on the horse and sulky.  How valuable this photo! 

Some older family members may have photographs that can be copied for your records; or you might pick up images online if you’re searching for photos of a particular church perhaps.  Items like this only add to the “big picture”.  Not only a photo of great-grandmother, and great-grandfather in your possession now, but also a photo of the church where they had been married, or where their young children had been baptized perhaps.

Joining an online genealogy group can also offer the opportunity of making contact with others who may share a common family member within their own tree.  You may be fortunate enough to have typed in a name, and instantly located a “hot-match” on some-one else’s tree.  Make contact with them and you could well prove to be third cousins, three times removed.  Here’s your one-in- a- million chance it seems, to pick up some priceless records and photographs; just for the cost of a six or twelve monthly subscription.  That, plus a very special new friendship, because undoubtedly you are able to send information and photographs too, in return.

As you gather more and more information and photographs, display them in a hardbound scrapbook album and it will undoubtedly become a treasure not only to you, but also your family descendants, over many, many years ahead.  

Learn more about this author, Carole Meisenhelter.
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