Family Tree info for Farmer Kitty and others

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Linda in San Diego

Linda in San Diego

Songster
11 Years
May 11, 2008
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San Diego
My Uncle Edward found a great family tree site. www.geni.com just go there, start building your tree and invite family. We now have family from all over adding their family in and leaving messages. It is great. The more you know about your tree, the more family you can add!

Check it out!
 
I missed the original thread, but I'm always up for a genealogical discussion!
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There are so many options for family research on the Internet and it truly is a fun and rewarding hobby.

Just remember - Unless you've seen the proof, take any submitted data with a grain of salt. Mahroni mentions FamilySearch. There is good info there and bad info there. Someone, somewhere messed up my granny and listed her as born in Utah in 1885. She was born in Canada in 1896. I have the records to prove it; They do not. Yet, there are a dozen trees elsewhere on the Net (Ancestry.com, personal websites, etc) who list that same data that FamilySearch has posted. With such overwhelming "evidence" that she was born in 1885 in Utah, it'd be easy to simply repeat it over and over and over again - which is what has happened in her case. She married while older and had a child at a late age so a birth in 1885 would have been impossible!

To top it off, her first name was shortened and she changed her last name when she sneaked over the border from Canada to the US, further complicating things and often, ummm, colored the truth in her records to hide the fact that entered this country illegally. She was married in a state other than the one she was living in (thank you FamilySearch for getting the date right [see there IS good info there!] - and family stories got me the place). All of this must be documented if you're going to do it correctly. A good genealogy program is a must.

Family history is like reading a mystery novel and having to follow the clues!

All this to say that genealogical research is a lot of fun but it isn't easy. Sure, there's data out there but the real challenge is to see if any of it can be backed up with documentation.
 
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I think part of the problem is that so many early ancestors were so busy trying to survive that they did not go to school, so they couldn't read or write. Also, the people writing the info down sometimes had horrible handwriting and misspelled. Nicknames and middle names were often used in a census. Another problem was courthouse fires, which destroyed lots of records.

I found actual documents in a make shift library in the 1990s. We had to put our purses in a locker but were allowed to sort through boxes of old records, so records were often stolen. I found my great-grandparents marriage license, but the xerox machines were awful. The whole procedure has since changed.

I found many things locally, even on film from libraries.
 
Ohhh! I love courthouse and library research! Every few years when my frequent flyer miles have stacked up, I drag my family on a research trip.
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We mix a little sightseeing with family research. The hubby and kids stay back and play in the hotel pool or visit local sites, while I hole up in the courthouse or library.

Some courthouses will still allow you to go through the original documents and others will not. Some will allow you to copy them yourself while others will do it for you. Often in an older courthouse, documents aren't where they're supposed to be, so being able to search the boxes yourself can help you find something that would otherwise come back as 'not found' if you had done the request by mail.

A couple of online places I'd recommend for family research:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ - especially the message boards and mailing lists. There are all kinds of volunteers who're willing to do lookups for you.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Genealogy4Dummies/ - A must-belong-to group for learning everything you need to know about working on your family tree. It's where I started nearly 10 years ago. This is THE most friendly genealogy group on the Net (often goes off-topic because it's like a family, much like BYC) and folks do all kinds of lookups for one another - especially census lookups or other lookups at paid genealogy sites.
 
Another source that I forgot are funeral homes. My family has used a funeral home since 1906 and I was able to get a copy of my great-grandparents records, which gave me leads to other information.

I live 50 miles away and it may have been because my cousins went to school with the present generation. It has been family-owned since 1906. It is worth a try though.
 
If you go looking into your family's past, be prepared to take the bad with the good. Murders and hangings are not fun things to put into your book of rememberance.

Unhappy marriages and family desertions, illegal immigration and prison sentences are also unpleasant suprises.

Yes, a good place to look for missing relatives is prison records. They are open for inspection in some states. They give list of approved visitors and their relationship to the inmate.

My great aunt ran brothels; her husband was a scoundrel and a bootlegger.

My grandfather that we all assumed was born in Mexico, was in reality born in Commanche, Iowa.

One great grandmother was an octoroon.

We found out my mother never had a birth certificate and just made up places to claim as a birth place.

I had uncles that specialized in armed robbery.

Be prepared.
 

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