Powell - The everything guide to online genealogy: trace your roots, share your history, and create a family tree

Avon, Massachusetts

To Albrecht, my incredible husband who fills my life with passion, inspiration, purpose, and love. Thank you for bringing your parents and our children into my world, and for being my best friend.

IT SEEMS AS IF almost everyone is at least mildly interested in discovering his or her roots. Maybe youre curious about the origin of your last name or why Grandpa never spoke about his family. Perhaps you hope for a famous relative or a bit of scandal in your background. Or maybe youre tired of people asking you where your red hair and freckles came from and want to find out for yourself. Ten years ago, your curiosity may have ended with asking your parents a few questions about your ancestors or looking in the library for a book on your family. Today, the Internet has revolutionized the search for family history and heritage, allowing anyone with a consuming curiosity and a passion for answers to trace his or her ancestry and make connections with long-lost relatives.

Remote Internet access to historical documents and records has dramatically increased the number of people interested in researching the past. Following the release of the 1940 U.S. census on April 2, 2012, the National Archives reported that 1.9 million users hit its census servers in the first four hours after the data went public, with requests coming in as fast as 100,000 per second. Documents that once required extensive travel to view are now instantly available to anyone around the world at the click of a mouse. This tremendous growth of online source material means that time and distance are no longer the constraints to research that they once were. Genealogy really has become accessible to anyone.

While the Internet is a valuable tool for anyone researching a family tree, dont expect to be able to conduct your research solely online. Some of the information you seek will only be found in the files of the state archives or county courthouse, or on the tombstone concealed in the middle of a North Carolina cornfield. Even in these cases, however, the Internet can provide clues to the location of such records and connect you to other genealogists who may be able to help you access them. You can also use the Internet to build a family tree and share it with your extended family, take a class to expand your knowledge, collaborate with fellow researchers on puzzling problems, explore the history that your ancestors once lived, and connect with previously unknown cousins.

Beyond the Internet, technology has also advanced genealogy research in other ways. Specialized software makes it easy to keep track of hundreds or thousands of tangled family connections. DNA testing can tell you if you share common ancestry with another individual, or help you confirm descent from a particular ethnic or geographical population. Satellite images help you visualize the places where your ancestors once lived. Constructing a medical family tree can possibly even save your life!

Real-life examples of genealogy research on the Internet are a special feature of this book. In most cases, well-known individuals such as Laura Ingalls Wilder and J.K. Rowling are used to illustrate the research process, but while there is more information available about these famous figures online than youll find for most people, the biographies and media accolades are ignored, and the search for records that chronicle the lives of their ancestors is conducted in the same databases and websites you would examine for your own relatives. By seeing how the research techniques discussed in this book can be used to research their family trees, youll hopefully gain a better understanding of how to apply the same techniques to your own family history search.

You are about to embark on a fascinating trip into your own past. Youll make many discoveries along the way, both about your ancestors and about yourself. You may find that ancestors who led quiet, ordinary lives can be fascinating in their own special ways, and that history is much more interesting when you know that your ancestors were participants. Before long, youll be addicted for life. Genealogy is an extremely rewarding pastime. I hope you enjoy the journey!

This is a fantastic time to start your journey into genealogy. Paper is the past and digital is now. New technologies, ranging from the Internet to digital photography, have spawned an explosion in the popularity of genealogy. New software simplifies storing, organizing, and retrieving family tree data. Images of original records long locked away in archives can be viewed online. Research guides, databases, and the expertise of other genealogists are all readily available at the click of a mouse. In short, research can be conducted more quickly, and data is more readily available to anyone with an interest in his or her past. So jump right in!

Thanks to new technological advances, information on your ancestors is just a click of the mouse away. Millions of digitized images, from marriage certificates to military service records, can be viewed online. Published genealogies allow budding family historians to extend their family tree by generations in just a few minutes. There is even free online software available to help you record the information you find and build your family tree. It sounds so easy, right?

As valuable as the Internet is for family history research, it does have its limitations. Most important, dont expect to find your family tree already done for you. The Internet is just one of many research tools and resources youll utilize in the discovery of your past. For every genealogical record that you find online, thousands more are still only available in libraries, archives, courthouses, and other repositories.

Much of the genealogy information published online comes in the form of indexes or transcriptions, which point to more likely reliable original records. And, of course, not everything located online is correct, necessitating research in additional sources to prove your family connections. Yes, the Internet will simplify and enhance your quest for your roots, but it should be considered a valuable supplement to more traditional methods of research, not the sole tool for tracing your family tree.

Before using the Internet to plug into your past, you first need to learn a few tools of the tradethe symbols, terminology, and conventions used by genealogists to collect, record, and communicate the relationships in a family tree. Some of the information presented in this introductory chapter may seem a bit complex if you are new to genealogy, but after you spend a little time tracing your family tree it will all start to come together.

Why are you interested in your family history? Are you curious about the origin of your last name? Do you want to learn more about great-grandpas Polish roots? Are you hoping to identify as many of your ancestors as possible? Has an interesting story been handed down in your family that you want to pursue? Defining what you hope to learn on this journey is an important first step.