February is Black History Month
Researching your family history may seem like an overwhelming task,
but if you take it in small sections, you can do it.
- The easiest way to begin your research is to interview your family members. Find out what they know about other family members, what they remember growing up and stories they were told. You'd be surprised how much information you'll gain from that information that will help you begin to look for vital records (birth, marriage and death records).
- That said, family information can sometimes be incorrect. You may have an Uncle Chuck that everyone knows as Uncle Chuck. And eventually you find out his real name was Lou and that Chuck was a family joke. Or that someone was from one state, when they were actually born in another - although they moved from that state at an age too young to remember it. Nonetheless, those family interviews are a great place to start!
- If you find you hit the proverbial brick wall, try working on another branch of the family.
- Census records are great in helping you place your ancestors, but they can also have mistakes. Names can be misspelled, people's ethnicity can be incorrectly classified by the surveyors and ages may shift too much from census to census. Be patient, and look for additional supplementary information.
- County lines can change - look at old maps to get an idea of which counties neighbor your ancestor's county. They may have never moved, but the county lines did!
- Be mindful of the Great Migration. Millions of African Americans moved out of the rural South to major Northern cities, such as New York and Chicago, or out to California, during 1914 to 1950.
Great places to start:
www.Rootsweb.com - this helpful free site will show you all the nifty things at your disposal, from reference websites to where to write for a copy of your ancestor's social security card application!
www.Ancestry.com - this is a pay site, but it gives you access to immigration records, census records from 1700 to 1930, as well as birth, marriage, death and military records.
www.Afrigeneas.com - a free site devoted to African-American Genealogy with helpful tips and pointers
www.usgenweb.org - the USGenWeb project is a series of volunteer-driven free genealogy sites for every country and state of the United States.
www.familysearch.org - any good genealogy search begins here, with their gigantic database of genealogy records.
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