Jeff Ausmus - Genealogy 101: Discover Your Ancestors for Next to Nothing

Genealogy 101:

Discover Your Ancestors For Next toNothing

by Jeff Ausmus

This e-book is a guide to genealogy research ata low cost, in most cases for nearly free. If you enjoy thise-book, please consider leaving a review for the author, and thencome back to see the authors other works!

The cover images are several family photos. Allimages in this e-book are property of Jeff Ausmus.

This book is dedicated to my family, Kim,Frankie, Willow, Bean and Zulu. I love you so much!

2017, Jeff Ausmus

Published by Jeff Ausmus atSmashwords.

This e-book is licensed for your personalenjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away toother people. If you would like to share this book with anotherperson, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Ifyoure reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was notpurchased for your use only, then please return to your favoritee-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you forrespecting the hard work of this author.

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Table of Contents

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I. Introduction

Welcome! Thank you for purchasing thisgenealogy e-book. The fact that youre here means that you probablyhave some interest in finding out information about your ancestors.Or maybe you just want to see how all this genealogy stuff works.In any event, youve come to the right place!

But next to nothing? That meansjust about free. Really? Thats probably what youre thinking. Isit really free todiscover your ancestors? Well, strictly speaking, no. It might costgas money to drive to visit that one relative, or to the library.You might have to order a microfilm that costs seven dollars, orpay twenty cents for some copies occasionally. But, does it costshundreds of dollars? Do you need a monthly subscription toAncestry, or some other costly website? Do you need to hire anexpert? No. None of those things are necessary. Dont get me wrong,they can be helpful, for sure! And if you have some extra money andyou simply dont have time to do the research yourself, then by allmeans, hire someone! I myself do genealogy research for people as agenealogist; you can even hireme if you want! All of that isfine, if a person has no time to do research on their own and hasthe money and desire for an expert. But, the reason I wrote thisbook is because when I started researching, I didnt have the money to do that,and simply could not afford it. And I found out that it wascompletely unnecessary to spend large quantities of moneyresearching, when almost everything I found and I found a lot! -could be obtained for free or at low cost.

Genealogy research has made some amazingstrides over the last ten to fifteen years. In the past,researching your ancestors probably meant tons of phone calls, manytrips to the library, or even out of state trips (or at leastfrustrating phone calls) to various record offices and possiblymoney to hire someone to help. With the advent of the internet, onecan now contact far away places with a few strokes of the keyboardand with the ever-increasing number of records available online, ithas become possible to research your ancestry from the comfort ofyour own home. Many cities and states are beginning to offergenealogy copies of records at lower cost, for ancestry purposesonly; often libraries now have a genealogist on staff to help withresearching. In some cases, it is still necessary to leave home toconduct research, but even so, it is absolutely much easier thaneven just ten or twenty years ago.

The goal of this book is to show you that youcan research your ancestors fairly easily, and without much cost,either! That isnt to say there wont be some effort involved; itisnt easy in the sense that everything you want to find willfall right in your lap, but it is easy in the sense that you canusually make it happen, if you utilize the right tools to advanceyour research properly. Over the last eleven years, I havediscovered all of my ancestors back to fifth great-grandparents,except one that I only know back to third great-grandparent;additionally, some of my ancestral lines Ive discovered back toeleventh great-grandparents! - and I have hardly spent any moneydoing it. I have even branched outside of my own research and foundout tons of information on my wife, and sibling-in-laws ancestors.This is something you can do for yourself and your own family, also read on to find out how you can get started!

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II. My Journey

My journey in genealogy began aroundThanksgiving of 2008; before that, I might not have even know whatgenealogy was, but since then it has been a wild and excitingride.

At that time, I was having a conversation withmy grandmother, and I asked her about her own grandparents and whatshe knew about them. Her answers were pretty shocking to me.Something like, I think my Grandpas name was Bill. And theanswers got less specific from there on. As it turned out, hergrandfather had died about five years before she was born, so itwas perhaps not so surprising that she didnt know that much abouthim, but the mere fact that she didnt even know his name strucksomething in me that began a journey which has led to many amazingdiscoveries in my own ancestry.

In further prodding, my grandmother knew shehad an Uncle Bill. Since she didnt seem to know so much about hergrandparents, I began with Uncle Bill, not really having any whereelse to go. As I looked into what would be my great-great UncleBill, I found out that he had a son, and grandson, and agreat-grandson. The great-grandson was alive and living in Arizona.So, I searched for his contact information and lo and behold, I wasable to contact him by email. I asked him what he knew about thefamily history. He indicated that he didnt know too much, but thathe had had a family bible kind of just laying around which had beenpassed down, and he thought it might have some information in it,but was unsure what it said because most of it was written inGerman. I asked him to send me a copy of it, so he made copies andemailed them to me.

As it turned out, the bible did contain somevery important information, indeed! Listed right in front were thenames of my great-great-grandparents, the date of their marriageand the town that they came from in Germany! The congregation ofthe church they belonged to had even given them the bible as awedding gift. Not only that, but hand-written in the bible were thedates of birth of all their children (including mygreat-grandfather), as well as the dates of death of their parents.Reading this was a bit of a task, because of the nature of thescript, as German script in the late 1800s is quite different fromthe way things are written now, but luckily I was able to enlistthe help of a friend from Germany (and in many cases, there arevolunteers or even random people who are willing to help in thisregard, if you reach out to them).

Once I knew the town my ancestors came from, Itook it upon myself to contact someone in that town using Google this was just a random shopkeeper from the town (just anyone Icould find on Google), but I explained that my ancestors had comefrom that town, and they forwarded me to someone, who forwarded meto someone else, and that person knew the history of my entireancestry himself. He told me that he felt like he knew myancestors, and said he had been studying the ancestors of the townfor the past fifty years and proceeded to mail me a packet fromGermany, with pictures of the town, and collections of churchbaptismal records of my ancestors. He also he sent me a family treechart of those ancestors going back to the late 1600s! He did allof this free of charge and was very happy to have been able to helpme.