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New Obsessions
Sep. 30th, 2011 02:34 pmSo I started digging through bits of my family tree, just out of curiosity, but now it's become a full blown project. I should start doing further updates on the progress of this.
But for the most part, the most annoying thing is how silly some people on Ancestry can be. It's like they've gone through and just found the first person that matches the name of their ancestor without comparing dates or locations or even their children's names. It's just very annoying, and makes finding accurate matches very difficult.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks I've found (other than other stupid people) involves my lack of knowledge on the dates of family members that are close to me (including my own grandparents). I have no clue when they were married, or when their parents died. Birth Certificates aren't made public until 75 years after the fact, and it takes 25 years for death certificates to be released too. Marriage and divorce records are public from the start, though. If you can find them. Spotty digitization of the records... blah.
Since the majority of my family comes from the area of my hometown, I'll have quite a bit of work to do over Christmas, including going through my grandmother's files and research. I should call my other grandmother and ask her to fill in some of the dates that I'm missing so that I can fill in those blanks.
I've been able to go pretty far back on some branches, though. For the most part, it looks like my dad's parents families were very early Americans in Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. That's great for me now, since those archives are within close reach for me now, and I can spend a few weekends sifting through those. And the National Archives are close, but going there can be overwhelming if you don't know exactly what you're after.
It's a fun adventure, and I'm hoping to eventually learn more about people's occupations so that I can pull some kind of narrative together to pass along to my family. At the very least, it'd be cool to make up some vignettes based on facts I know about people's lives in the times and places where they lived.
<3
But for the most part, the most annoying thing is how silly some people on Ancestry can be. It's like they've gone through and just found the first person that matches the name of their ancestor without comparing dates or locations or even their children's names. It's just very annoying, and makes finding accurate matches very difficult.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks I've found (other than other stupid people) involves my lack of knowledge on the dates of family members that are close to me (including my own grandparents). I have no clue when they were married, or when their parents died. Birth Certificates aren't made public until 75 years after the fact, and it takes 25 years for death certificates to be released too. Marriage and divorce records are public from the start, though. If you can find them. Spotty digitization of the records... blah.
Since the majority of my family comes from the area of my hometown, I'll have quite a bit of work to do over Christmas, including going through my grandmother's files and research. I should call my other grandmother and ask her to fill in some of the dates that I'm missing so that I can fill in those blanks.
I've been able to go pretty far back on some branches, though. For the most part, it looks like my dad's parents families were very early Americans in Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. That's great for me now, since those archives are within close reach for me now, and I can spend a few weekends sifting through those. And the National Archives are close, but going there can be overwhelming if you don't know exactly what you're after.
It's a fun adventure, and I'm hoping to eventually learn more about people's occupations so that I can pull some kind of narrative together to pass along to my family. At the very least, it'd be cool to make up some vignettes based on facts I know about people's lives in the times and places where they lived.
<3
