Genealogy and Family History Community — Help Me
I’ve been doing genealogy research for fifty years now. I don’t know everything, but basics one can learn fairly quickly.
Get a computer-based genealogy program. A few are free online. You will need a way of organizing this data.
How-to books on the subject of genealogy do say “Start with yourself.” The second thing they say is “Get documents for everything.”
What does your birth certificate say?
What are the names and ages of your parents listed (your mother’s maiden name is supposed to be listed, not her married name)? What are their occupations? Some states have birth dates and locations of birth for the parents on their child’s birth certificate. It really all depends on the state and the era. The older the info, the more likely it’s only found in old ledger books instead of filed as separate pieces of paper for each person.
Then get US census data. The 1940 US census was just released on 2 April this year. Not all of those records are indexed yet…, but, if you have a specific location in mind, you can scroll through the records and find the people you’re looking for and if you are old enough, your parents and grandparents and their siblings will be in those census pages, and – so far – there are two or three web sites that have free downloads of the 1940 US census images.
http://1940census.archives.gov/
1930 US census and earlier: Many are indexed on the LDS web site (quality of transcriptions for the indexes often leaves much to be desired – and in some cases, some were not indexed, and in others, the transcribers were clearly not thinking when they couldn’t read plain handwriting). Home page for the LDS site:
https://www.familysearch.org/
Click on United States. A long index will pop up. Where there are camera icons images are available – some are free on the LDS site (unbelievably, I’ve actually found documents for a free download in a few cases). Some are able to be scrolled through, and where one is lucky, there is an index. Otherwise…, it’s slogging through one image at a time until one finds the image with the information you’re looking for.
1900 US census is indexed and the images are available for a free download on the LDs site. Re-name each document as you download it. Start with year, two-letter state code, county, township/town, then surname of the person listed on that page. That way all your census images will index themselves numerically and alphabetically in your files. Start a census file in your computer and put ONLY census info in it. It will soon be very large.
1910, 1920, 1930 are indexed…, but you’re redirected to a fee-based web site. For those, just find the info on the person you’re looking for…, and go to another web site where ALL US census images are free (but not indexed!):
Internet Archive.
http://archive.org/…
Lots of good things on this web site, including scanned books whose copyrights have long since run out, so if you have early ancestors and need a genealogy book about them, the chances of you finding it on Internet Archive.org AND on Google Books are equally good. Either way, as long as the copyright is expired, both are free downloads. You can also view videos that have been released for free viewing, like The Power of Nightmares, for instance.
As far as census data on the Internet Archive web site, there’s a master index, then you have to find the state, then the county and townships.
http://archive.org/…
There is a US Census every ten years from 1790 forward. Not a lot of info is found until ca 1850 or so. 1900 forward is a positive goldmine of info. Caveat: The accuracy of the records is only as good as the accuracy of the answers of the person who gave the census enumerator the info. The first thing you’ll find is that census enumerators were hired because they knew how to write. Spelling ability… optional. You cannot imagine how many alternate ways of spelling common names there are until you start to go through US census data.
1890 US census: only the Veteran’s Schedules still exist (veterans of the Civil War). The rest of the 1890 census burned in a fire, but the Veteran’s Schedules were kept in a different location so they survived intact. [Commence crying. Every serious genealogy researcher weeps for lack of the 1890 census at some point.]
If you’re lucky, you lived in one of the states that did a state census in years ending in 5, and that includes 1885 1895. It almost makes up for the lack of the 1890 census. Many of those state censuses are indexed and the images are available for a free download on the LDS site.
Courthouse records, like police records, are “public records.” That means all records there you may look at (except for modern sealed juvenile records – but if the records are old, it might be possible to petition a court to see them). There are birth, marriage, divorce, and death records – courthouses are where modern “reporters” from rags like Star ‘magazine’ and the like get the information when petitions are filed and how they know about all the things that end up on gossip shows. Court cases of all kinds (criminal and civil). Probate records. Deeds plat maps.
Since courthouses hold “public records,” you – as a member of the public – are entitled to see all the records whether they pertain to you or not. Fees for copies vary. I always ask for copies of original documents. They certify them and sell them to me for the higher price of certified documents. I don’t care as long as it’s a copy of the original record, not a fill-in-the-blanks certification. (I had a certified copy of the death info for one of my gr-grandmothers for years. Missing: cause of death. A friend went to the courthouse for the county where she died, looked in the old ledger books pre-1900, snapped digital photos with her camera: cause of death was measles. There was no blank to fill in for cause of death on the certified copy form, so I went for many years not knowing why she died at the young age of 42.) Yes, you’ll soon figure out there’s no “long form” and “short form” records. There’s only the ones listed in ledgers (usually pre-1900), and the ones where there’s only one record per sheet of paper (after 1900). Specifics will vary from county to county, but that’s the generality for what kind of records to find for births, marriages, divorces, and deaths of ancestors and their siblings. Yes, research the siblings, too. Do your research by family unit. If you lose someone you may be able to find them by researching the life of a sibling.
Oddly enough, images of some of those courthouse records for a very few counties in a very few states are on the LSD site, and are available for a free download. I know. I couldn’t believe it either, but I found a few documents for a side lineage I’m researching, downloaded the images, so that saved me a huge amount of money (and headaches in tracking down the said documents since I didn’t know where they were in the first place).
The fee-based web sites are sometimes good, sometimes NOT. Like everything else, they can be a tool to further your research. Just don’t take everything you find on those web sites as gospel truth. Even the documents can be wrong. There really is free information out there that is accurate and useful, even if it’s only an index put online by some lovely volunteer who contributed the info to a genealogy web site (Rootsweb, for instance). It can be a real lifesaver just finding names and dates in an indexed file somewhere.
Genealogy research in the US is not a cheap hobby, but whatever you do, do NOT use online pedigree information in your documentation thinking someone else has done the research already. They most likely have not. Many have only copied someone else’s data…, and that means the original data may not be correct or what documents say or the info they publish may be a typo and most assuredly not correct. You can use someone else’s info to potentially point you in the right direction (if they got their facts straight off of documents); just do not use their data. Get your own documents. [If you enter the wrong info in your genealogy program, you’ll have to delete stuff or correct it, and it’s a hassle. I no longer add info to my database unless I know I have correct data. I hate, hate, hate having to do corrections!]
Modern courthouses (in large cities) are a bitch to deal with thanks to the laws that have come about as a result of paranoid Congress Critters did with the Patriot Acts and afterwards. They went WAY overboard. (Fact: more ‘identity theft’ is accomplished by thieves absconding with tossed ads than by anything they can find online on a web site or in old records. Shred all those credit card solicitations, your bank statements, etc., before putting in the garbage.) Courthouses in small communities are much easier to deal with. The people who work at the courthouse where I was born and raised knew me before modern laws. They know I’ve been doing genealogy research on my family and people who married into my family all these years…, they don’t even bother to ask me to fill out those stupid privacy forms. I love those particular people for having an abundance of common sense!
Do not use numbers for dates. Use day, date, and year, and spell out ALL information in full. In the US the dates are usually (but not always) listed as month, day, and year. In Europe the dates are listed as day, month, and year, and they use numbers that way. You’ll soon discover that when the church records list 25/10 ’49 and you try to figure out the correct date. It’s 25 October 1849. Yes, suddenly you have to make sure you have the correct century in the years listed.
Do not use abbreviations of any kind for any reason (except when transcribing data; then you have to put exactly what someone else wrote; add notes and spell out the abbreviations at the end of the transcription). If someone runs across your paperwork in two hundred years and the documents you acquired don’t come with your basic genealogy info, and they want to duplicate your research, the meaning behind abbreviations may have changed…, or someone in a foreign country will mistake the meaning of an abbreviation. Spell out everything. List locations from smallest to largest: (town, if applicable), township, county, state. [Census data lists Town of___. That is township. There’s a separate blank for the name of a village, town, city.]
For women, use the name on their birth certificate and do NOT add her married name. If you don’t know her birth surname, leave the surname space blank. Nicknames can be listed in the Miscellaneous Information about them. I hate doing research in the US for the simple reason I lose too many women to married names. In the Scandinavian countries where I’ve done so much research for the last few years (Norway and Denmark have their records online for free, thanks to the taxpayers in those countries; Sweden let corporations copy the church records, so they are not free), the patronymic naming system was used until the early 20th century. Some people in large cities used inheritable surnames before then, even in the countryside by 1900-1910 sometimes, but by how the records are listed, one always knows what the patronymic name will be and women kept their own names their entire lives because of that, so I never lose them to name changes. Iceland and the Faroe Islands still use the patronymic naming system to this day. [Yes, a patronymic name and a surname are two entirely different things. Unless you have Scandinavian ancestors, you probably don’t have to worry about it.]
The above info will get you basic data in the US.
If you’re still lost, KosMail me, list the full names, dates and location of birth of the people you need to find if they are old enough to be listed in the 1930 census or earlier, and I’ll see what I can do. No guarantees if I’ll find info, but the worst I can say is ‘I don’t know.’
Good Luck.
