Genealogy - A Glimpse to Your Past

The common meaning of Genealogy is that it is the study of one’s own family or their beginnings. Who knows, there might be a possibility that your ancestor might be a king in some country or someone s a hero that liberated a group of oppressed farmers. This is an exciting adventure that you can’t miss out on and this often makes up who a person really is. But aside from the stories that you were told by older relatives and what they have hidden up in the attic, most people do not know where to start when researching about their family history.

Places to find your roots

In this technologically advanced age, the internet is the place to start when searching for information about your genealogy. Here you can find anything from marriage licenses, birth or death certificates, military records, census records, wills, or even old tax information. The only problem that you will most likely come across while doing your search is filtering out which ones really are your relatives from among the hundreds of people that you will find records of.

You see, it can be very hard to imagine how many people have the same names or very similar names to your past relatives. What you have to do when this happens is to be ready by knowing some bits and pieces of your past history. That way, you will be able to fill in the gaps. Basically, the more information you put into a search engine on these sites, the better it will be for you since the results will be much narrower.

Another advantage with searching online is that most sites update and upload a lot of records from places all over the world. This means that an average person can search for his roots at any time wherever they may reside. But if you are not able to use the internet, an alternative way to search is through the local court house. Similar to the genealogy websites, you can various data such as marriage licenses, birth or death certificates, or divorce records.

If your genealogy data still has some gaps, you can try searching in funeral homes in the towns that your ancestors lived in the past and cemeteries where they are buried. So aside from death records, funeral homes can also provide clues to valuable information like the names of the spouses, children, or parents.