Introduction to Genealogy

People are by nature curious, as curious as Pandora who opened the box the gods gave to her and let every plague for the body and sorrows for the mind get out of it except for the one good thing called hope or just as curious as a little girl who wants to know why we have great-great-great grandparents and wants to know who they might be. Yes, sometimes we come into the point where we just want to explore our family's background, heritage and ancestors.

We tend to study our own roots maybe hoping to discover that we are related to the Queen of England or perhaps the former governors of the US who happened to have the same surname as ours. Or maybe, we hope to go into the adventurous quest of searching for a track leading us to proofs that our ancestor is a knight from the Medieval Age or a hero form the World War II trying to search for factors that might have made up who we are today. Now, that study is called genealogy. Genealogy is defined to be the study of one's own family or their roots. But aside from what our relatives can tell us based on what they can remember or what our grandparents can dig up from that century old attic, most of us just don't know how to and where to research for our family's history.

Well, not for so long, for we have a very powerful source now which doesn't run out of information to give us, the internet. All we have to know is where to go from there. If you do not have a clue which websites are designed specifically for genealogy, then you can just go to your favorite browser and search in for genealogy websites or you can go to genealogy.com, Rootsweb, or MyHeritage some of the well known websites which can absolutely cater for your search on your family's history and can offer you several sources of information. Several information you can get includes marriage licenses, divorce papers, birth or death certificates, military records, census records, wills, and even old tax information.

One delicate thing you must consider when doing research is how to filter up results to know who among these tons of people really your relatives are. We can never neglect the fact that there are tons of people out there who have the same or very similar surname and even bits of information as you have. The more information you can give the website for filtering the more you can fill in the blanks to the track to your real relatives. Even greater news for you is that, these websites have gathered and uploaded tons of information from places where average people do not have easy access to or to very old information like your ancestor's long ago trip to the Americas or Europe. Another thing to remember with these types of documents is that they were recorded long ago so we should expect that these are all handwritten and we have to expect technical errors as to misspelled names and even places.

Another place we can look up to is our local court house or your state department. Just like the genealogy websites, we can get documents like marriage licenses, birth or death certificates, or divorce records. More often, these are the places you need to visit to fill in that missing link to your filtering information on the internet to get the most accurate results. Not so obvious places to search for are your or your ancestor's local funeral homes and cemeteries. Here you can find information in addition to death records are names you might not know like spouse's, children's, parents' and other direct descendant's names.

Genealogy, unlike any other hobby, gives a very rewarding outcome for not only will you benefit from it but also the next generations to come and even current family members who are also interested in your family's history. If it is to be expected that someone would continue filling in your family's history in the next generations or even if not, you should be very careful to provide with very accurate information for them as much as possible.

Stan Alderson is a genealogy expert. For more great information on genealogy visit http://www.name-histories.com/.