Since I posted my new years weekend post in the Tilted Living section
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=112014 , several people have contacted me about this fascinating and addicting subject, plus the discussion going on in the graves thread.... so I thought I would start a thread about it (watch it totally die lol)
A lot of people think this is "a hobby for blue haired old ladies and old men with walking sticks and nothing better to do". I am here to tell you thats just not so.
I started researcing my family when I was 13 as a result of a school project, and I am now the one people contact from my own family, my ex husbands family and Dave's family when their kids have to do something similar (and I think Im as far from a blue haired old lady as a person can get lol)
I will be the first to say its not for everyone, but if you are a person that loves to try to solve a mystery, or wants to find out about some story you heard when you were a kid or someone that loves never ending research then it just may be your "thing".
Some people see it as an "overwhelming" but if you start right, its really not.
The first thing you need to do is buy a genealogy software program. There are debates on which is best, personally I recommend Family Tree Maker. I have looked at them all over the years and FTM to me is the best, but everyone is different, I've been using it since it was first on the market.
Once you have the program installed, you simply start by putting in all the information on yourself...then you proceed to your parents, entering everything you know about them...then progress to their parents etc. It lets you print out a report that you can look at and tell immediately what information you still need to get.
Back when I started there was no internet (*gasp* yes it was that long ago....but remember my hair isnt blue yet so it WAS after the invention of the wheel and sliced bread) and you actually had to go to county courthouses and geneaological societys or state/national archives to view service records, census reports (these are made public after 72 years, so the latest one to be released is 1930....1940 wont be released until 2012) which are a wealth of information depending on the year, land deeds, bastardy bonds (which are really cool to look at if the county you are researching required them) birth, death, marriage records etc. NOW you can find a LOT of this stuff online at places like
http://www.rootsweb.com and
http://www.ancestry.com without ever having to leave your house. I still love visiting courthouses though because the smell of musty old court records excites me lol
I can promise...you WILL run into what we researches call a brick wall....you will have a person that completely disappears for no apparent reason (death), you will have 1st cousins that married (yes, that USED to be legal), and everyone on both those sides named their kids the same thing or you will absolutely need to know where someone was in 1890 and cant find them because the census records burned in a fire in DC in the 20's and the only records you can find are a few here and there that the county happened to still have on file, or you will find you need to find the immigration of some Irish person that came here as a stowaway on a ship to America so there is no record. Its THESE things that make this so infuriatingly addicting.
You could be like me when I was researching my ex's family for 10 years, searching in total vain for a bible I knew had been passed down thru the family because it was willed to a certain family member, only to find out that a branch of the family that you hadnt been researching yet had it, and it had been one mile from your house the ENTIRE 10 years you'd been looking for it, (can we imagine how elated and pissed off I was at the time? The pissed part didnt stay long when I held this 20 pounds bible in my hands and read the entries dating back to 1777)
So many people dont care about "history" or what their ancestors where about, or give a crap about their tombstone etc....this isnt for you, so please dont waste the space here telling me you dont care....it neither here nor there to me, this is for the people that ARE interested and want to start but feel they dont exaclty know where to start.
Im glad to answer any questions. I wont claim to know "everything" but I do have a good working knowledge of US research tactics. Im very adept in reading old documents. I worked with my county historical society for years transcribing things, such as the counties 1880 county census for book publication and old wills. If you have never seen a land grant or will from the 1800's it can be challenging trying to figure out the lingo that was used AND to read the handwriting, so Im glad to help with that if you run across something you cant read.
If more people did this then our brick walls would be less and less in the coming years, because someone always has an aunt or uncle somebody who remembers that even though great great grandmother nancy doesnt have a readable tombstone, she's buried under the poplar tree in the SW corner of the High Shoals Baptist cemetery (actual fact from my family used as example lol)
I hope this has inspired more people to look at their family histories and to understand this is not something you want to wait to do until you are old and cant leave the house, not being able to leave the house is a huge problem when doing research hehehe